“You have here a home, amigo,” Ramon reminded him. “Do you know how long a thousand dollars would support you? A year, perhaps. Then you would have to work for other men the rest of your life. Here you are free and independent.”
Guiterrez said nothing, but he had obviously received a new idea, and was impressed. Ramon never returned to the direct argument, but he missed no chance to stimulate Guiterrez’s pride in his establishment.
“This is a good little house you have amigo,” he would observe. And Guiterrez would tell him that the house had been built by his grandfather, but that its walls were as firm as ever, and that he had been intending for several years to plaster it, but had never gotten time. Before [pg 173] he was out of bed, Ramon was reasonably sure that Guiterrez would never sell.
The house was indeed charmingly situated on a hillside at the foot of which a little clear trout stream, called Rio Gallinas, chuckled over the bright pebbles in its bed and ran to hide in thickets of willow.
Sitting on the portal, which ran the length of the house and consisted of a projection of the roof supported by rough pine logs, Ramon could look down the canyon to where it widened into a little valley that lost itself in the vast levels of the mesa. There thirsty sands swallowed the stream and not a sprig of green marred the harmony of grey and purple swimming in vivid light, reaching away to the horizon where faint blue mountains hung in drooping lines.
By turning his head, Ramon could look into the heart of the mountains whence the stream issued through a narrow canyon, with steep, forested ridges on either side, and little level glades along the water, set with tall, conical blue spruce trees, pines with their warm red boles, and little clumps of aspen with gleaming white stems, and trembling leaves of mingled gold and green.
Ramon spent many hours with his back against the wall, his knees drawn up under his chin, Mexican fashion, smoking and vaguely dreaming of [pg 174] the girl he loved and of the things he would do. The vast sun drenched landscape before him was too much a part of his life, too intimate a thing for him to appreciate its beauty, but after his struggles with doubt and desire, it filled him with an unaccountable contentment. Its warmth and brightness, its unchanging serenity, its ceaseless soft voices of wind and water, lulled his mind and comforted his senses. The country was like some great purring creature that let him lie in its bosom and filled his body with the warm steady throb of its untroubled strength.
After a week of recuperation, he bought a horse from Guiterrez for a pack animal, loaded it with bedding and provisions and rode away into the mountains. His task was now to find other men who had fallen under the influence of MacDougall, and to persuade them not to sell their lands. Some of them would be at their homes, but others would be with the sheep herds, scattered here and there in the high country. He faced long days of mountain wandering, and for all that he longed to be done with his task, this part of it was sweet to him.