On his torn back a long black snake whip came down, wielded with merciless force. But he felt the full agony of the first blow only. The second seemed faint, and the third sent him plunging downward through a red mist into black nothingness.
CHAPTER XXIV
A few days later one bright morning Ramon was sitting in the sun before the door of his friend, Francisco Guiterrez, feeling still somewhat sore, but otherwise surprisingly well. Guiterrez, a young sheep-herder, held the position of coadjutor of the local penitente chapter, and one of his duties as such was to take the penitent to his house and care for him after the initiation. He had washed Ramon’s wounds in a tea made by boiling Romero weed. This was a remedy which the penitentes had used for centuries, and its efficacy was proved by the fact that Ramon’s cuts had begun to heal at once, and that he had had very little fever.
For a couple of days Ramon had been forced to lie restlessly in the only bed of the Guiterrez establishment. The Senora Guiterrez, a pretty buxom young Mexican woman, had fed him on atole gruel and on all of the eggs which her small flock of scrub hens produced; the seven little dirty brown Guiterrez children had come in to marvel at him with their fingers in their mouths; the Guiterrez goats and dogs and chickens had [pg 171] wandered in and out of the room in a companionable way, as though seeking to make him feel at ease; and Guiterrez himself had spent his evenings sitting beside Ramon, smoking cigarettes and talking.
This time of idleness had not been wholly wasted, either, for it had come out in the course of conversation that Guiterrez had been offered a thousand dollars for his place by a man whom he did not know, but whom Ramon had easily identified as an agent of MacDougall. Tempted by an amount which he could scarcely conceive, Guiterrez was thinking seriously of accepting the offer.
Now that he had won over Alfego and had gotten the influence of the penitentes on his side, Ramon’s one remaining object was to defeat just such deals as this, which MacDougall already had under way. He intended to stir up feeling against the gringos, and to persuade the Mexicans not to sell. Later, such lands as he needed in order to control the right-of-way, he would gain by lending money and taking mortgages. But he did not intend to cheat any one. Such Mexicans as he had to oust from their lands, he would locate elsewhere. He was filled with a large generosity, and with a real love for these, his people. He meant to dominate this country, [pg 172] but his pride demanded that no one should be poor or hungry in his domain. So now he argued the matter to Guiterrez with real sincerity.
“A thousand dollars? Por Dios, man! Don’t you know that this place is worth many thousand dollars to you?”
“How can it be worth many thousand?” Guiterrez demanded. “What have I here? A few acres of chile and corn, a little hay, some range for my goats, a few cherry trees, a house.… Many thousands? No.”