“Have you heard,” Ramon went on, in the same soft and emotional tone of voice, “that the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad is going to build a line through the San Antonio Valley?”
Alfego, without altering his look of rapt meditation, nodded his head slowly.
“Do you suppose that you will gain anything by that, if this gringo gets these lands?” Ramon went on. “You know that you will not. But I will make you my partner. And I will give you the option on any of my mountain land that you may wish to rent for sheep range. More than that, I will make you a written agreement to do these things. In all ways we will be as brothers.”
“You are a worthy and pious young man!” exclaimed Solomon Alfego, rolling his eyes upward, his voice vibrant with emotion. “You shall be my brother in the blood of Christ.”
CHAPTER XXIII
Ramon went to the Morada, the chapter house of the penitentes, alone and late at night, for all of the whippings and initiations of the order, except those of Holy Week, are carried on in the utmost secrecy.
The Morada stood halfway up the slope north of the little town, at the elevation where the tall yellow pines of the mountains begin to replace the scrubby juniper and pinon of the mesas and foothills. It was a cool moonlit night of late summer. A light west wind breathed through the trees, making the massive black shadows of the juniper bushes faintly alive. As he toiled up the rocky path Ramon heard the faraway yap and yodel of a coyote, and the still more distant answer of another one. From the valley below came the intermittent bay of a cur, inspired by the moon and his wild kin, and now and then the tiny silver tinkle of a goat bell.
The Morada stood in an open space. It was an oblong block of adobe, and gave forth neither light nor sound. Ramon stopped a little way from it in the shadow of a tree and lit a cigarette to steady his nerves. He felt now for the first [pg 164] time something of the mystery and terribleness of this barbaric order which he proposed to use for his purpose. All his life the penitentes had been to him a well-known fact of life. For the past week he had spent much of his time with the maestro de novios of the local chapter, a wizened old sheep herder, who had instructed him monotonously in the secrets of the order, almost lulling him to sleep with his endless mumblings of the ritual that was written in a little leather book a century old. He had learned that if he betrayed the secrets of the order, he would be buried alive with only his head sticking out of the ground, so that the ants might eat his face. He had been informed that if he fell ill he would be taken to the Morada where his brothers in Christ would pray for him, and seek to drive the devil out of his body, and that if he died, they would send his shoes to his family as a notice of that event; and would bury him in consecrated ground. Some of the things he had learned had bored him and some had made him want to laugh, but none of them had impressed him, as they were intended to do, with the might and dignity of the ancient order.