“I wonder what she’s up to?” The thought formed in Mrs. Mills’s mind.
She soon found out, for just then the “wind,” alias Ramon, “blew in.”
“Oh! I’m so glad to see you!”
With a swish of skirts that spread a delicate odor of violet along the corredor, Lee ran to meet him as he leaped from his horse. Then, giving him both hands, she inquired after his father, mother, Isabel, aunts, cousins—goodness knows! the category might have embraced every one of his peones if she had not been warned by the deepening of the young fellow’s rich color that it was about time to let go.
“Just a bit too effusive,” the widow made note. Aloud she broke in, “You are forgetting Mr. Nevil, dear.”
“Oh, I beg your pardon!” But the glint in her eye took it back and she managed the introductions with malicious skill. “Ramon, this is Mr. Nevil, our latest acquisition.”
“Just as if he’d been a horse,” the widow inwardly commented. To prevent further mischief, she took Lee in to help her set the table.
On first meeting, two women look in each other for possible enemies; two men for possible friends. Ramon, with his gentle, deprecatory manner, was so different from the Mexican of American fiction, skulking ever with a knife behind a bush, that he came to Gordon as a revelation. His great Spanish eyes glowing softly in the dusk under his huge gold-laced sombrero; the charro suit of soft leather that so finely displayed his lithe build; his fine horse and silver-crusted saddle—made such a figure as, in the prosaic East, is to be seen only on the stage.
Gordon, on the other hand, with his frank, breezy manner, appealed just as strongly to Ramon. After the exchange of cigarettes and a light they settled down to a friendly chat. Naturally the conversation ran from Gordon’s impressions of the country to a review of its troubles, and in course thereof he obtained an astonishing glimpse into the Mexican point of view.
“I do not know of myself,” Ramon replied to his question concerning the outcome, “but one could not listen to my father, who is old and wise, without forming some opinions. No, señor, we shall never settle our troubles ourselves—because, first, it isn’t in us; second, we do not try. Any settlement will have to come from the outside—but that we should fight. You would have every Mexican in the country at your throats. Even we, the Icarzas, and dozens of others who are now living on your side of the border, all of us who would have so much to gain and nothing to lose by a gringo occupation, would turn against you. Like careless wives we should resent the intrusion of a neighbor to set in order the house we are too lazy to clean ourselves. To tell the truth, señor”—he concluded his frank opinion with a gentle shrug—“we should fight any attempt on your part to limit our ‘God-given right’—as your political speakers would say—to cut one another’s throats and run off with one another’s women as we have been doing for thousands of years. We hated Diaz because he kept us from it. Since his overthrow we have done our best to make up the arrears.”