Withal it was necessary that he should go to Arriba County, follow up his campaign of the preceding fall, arrange a timber sale if possible so that he might buy land, and above all see that his sheep herds were properly tended. This was the crucial season in the sheep business. Like the other sheep owners, he ranged his herds chiefly over the public domain, and he gambled on the weather. If the rain continued into the early summer so that the waterholes were filled and the grass was abundant, he would have a good lamb crop. The sale of part of this and of the wool he would shear would make up the bulk of his income for the year. And he had already spent that income and a little more. He could not afford a bad year. If it was a dry spring, so that lambs and ewes died, he would be seriously embarrassed. In any case, he was determined to be on the range in person and not to trust the herders. If it came to the worst and the spring was dry he would rent mountain range from the Forest Service and rush his herds to the upland pastures as early as possible. He was not at all distressed or worried; he knew what he was about and had an appetite for the work.

One morning when he was in the midst of his preparations, he went to his office and found on the desk a small square letter addressed in a round, upright, hand. This letter affected him as though it had been some blossom that filled the room with a fragrant narcotic exhalation. It quickened the beat of his heart like a drug. It drove thought of everything else out of his mind. He opened it and the faint perfume of it flowed over him and possessed his senses and his imagination.…

It was a long, gossipy letter and told him of nearly everything that Julia had done in the six months since they had parted "forever". The salient fact was that she had been married. A young man in a New York brokerage office who had long been a suitor for her hand, and to whom she had once before been engaged for part of a summer, had followed the Roths to Europe and he and Julia had been married immediately after their return.

"I give you my word, I don't know why I did it," she wrote. "Mother wanted me to, and I just sort of drifted into it. First thing I knew I was engaged and the next thing mother was sending the invitations out, and then I was in for it. It was a good deal of fun being engaged, but when it came to being married I was scared to death and couldn't lift my voice above a whisper. Since then it has been rather a bore. Now my husband has been called to London. I am living alone here in this hotel. That is, more or less alone. A frightful lot of people come around and bore me, and I have to go out a good deal. I'm supposed to be looking for an apartment, too; but I haven't really started yet. Ralph won't be back for another two or three weeks, so I have plenty of time.

"I don't know why in the world I'm writing you this long frightfully intimate letter. I don't seem to know why I do anything these days. I know its most improper for a respectable married lady, and I certainly have no reason to suppose you want to be bothered by me any more after the way I did. But somehow you stick in the back of my head. You might write me a line, just out of compassion, if you're not too busy with all your sheep and mountains and things." She signed herself "as ever", which, he reflected bitterly, might mean anything.

At first the fact that she was married wholly engaged his attention. She was then finally and forever beyond his reach. This was the end sure enough. He was not going to start any long aimless correspondence with her to keep alive the memory of his disappointment. He planned various brief and chilly notes of congratulation.… Then another thought took precedence over that one. She was alone there in that hotel. Her husband was in London. She had written to him and given him her address.… His blood pounded and his breath came quick. He made his decision instantly, on impulse. He would go to New York.

He wired the hotel where she was stopping for a reservation, but sent no word at all to her. He gave the bewildered and troubled Cortez brief orders by telephone to go to Arriba County in his place, arranged a note at the bank for two thousand dollars, and caught the limited the same night at seven-thirty-five.



CHAPTER XXXII

He looked at New York through a taxicab window without much interest. A large damp grey dirty place, very crowded, where he would not like to live, he thought. He managed himself and his baggage with ease and dispatch; his indifferent, dignified manner and his reckless use of money were ideally effective with porters, taxi drivers and the like. When he reached the hotel about eight o'clock at night he went to his room and made himself carefully immaculate. He studied himself with a good deal of interest in the full length mirror which was set in the bath room door; for he had seldom encountered such a mirror and he had a considerable amount of vanity of which he was not at all conscious. It struck him that he was remarkably good-looking, and indeed he was more so than usual, his eyes bright, his face flushed, his whole body tense and poised with purpose and expectation.

He went down to the lobby, looked Julia up in the register, ascertained the number of her room, and made a note of it. Then he asked the telephone girl to call her and learn whether she was in.

"Yes; she is in. She wants to know who's calling, please."

"Tell her an old friend who wants to surprise her." He did not care to risk any evasion, and he also wanted his arrival to have its full dramatic effect.

The telephone girl transmitted his message.

"She says she can't come down yet … not for about half an hour."

"Tell her I'll wait. If she asks for me I'll be in that little room there." He pointed to a small reception room opening off the mezzanine gallery, which he had selected in advance. He had planned everything carefully.



When he stood up to meet her she gave a little gasp, and took a step back.

"Why, you! Ramon! How could you? You shouldn't have come. You know you shouldn't. I didn't mean that … I had no idea.…"

He came forward and took her hand and led her to a settee. Despite all her protests he could see very plainly that he had scored heavily in his own favour. She was flustered with excitement and pleasure. Like all women, she was captivated by sudden, decisive action and loved the surprising and the dramatic.

They sat side by side, looking at each other, smiling, making unimportant remarks, and then looking at each other again. Ramon felt that she had changed. She was as pretty as ever, and never had she stirred him more strongly. But her appeal seemed more immediate than before; she seemed less remote. The innocence of her wide eyes was a little less noticeable and their flash of recklessness a little more so. It seemed to him that her mouth was larger, which may have been due to the fact that she had rouged it a little too much. She wore a pink decollete with straps over the shoulders one of which kept slipping down and had to be pulled up again.

Ramon was tremulous with a half-acknowledged anticipation, but he held himself strongly in hand. He felt that he had an advantage over her—that he was more at ease and she less so than at any previous meeting—and he meant to keep it.

But she was rapidly regaining her composure, and took refuge in a rather formal manner.

"Are you going to be here long?" she enquired in the conventional tone of mock-interest.

"Just a week or so on business," he explained, determined not to be outpointed in the game. "I had to come some time this spring, and when I got your note I thought I would come while you are here."

"But I'll be here the rest of my life probably. This is where I live. You ought to have come when my husband was here. I'd like to have you meet him. As it is, I can't see much of you, of course.…"

He refused to be put out by this coldness, but tried to strike a more intimate note.

"Tell me about your marriage," he asked. "Are you really happy?… Do you like it?"

She looked at the floor gravely.

"You shouldn't ask that, of course," she reproved. "Everyone who has just been married is very, very happy.… No, I don't like it a darn bit."

"It's not what you expected, then."

"I don't know what I expected, but from the way people talk about it and write about it you would certainly think it was something wonderful—love and passion and bliss and all that, I mean. I feel that I've either been lied to or cheated … of course," she added with a little side glance at him, "I didn't exactly love my husband.…" She blushed and looked down again; then laughed softly and rather joyfully for a lady with a broken heart.

"If mother could only hear me now!" she observed.… "She'd faint. I don't care.… That's just the way I feel.… I don't care! All my life I've been trained and groomed and prepared for the grand and glorious event of marriage. I've been taught it's the most wonderful thing that can happen to anyone. That's what all the books say, and all the people I know. And here it turns out to be a most uncomfortable bore.…"

He looked gravely sympathetic.

"Do you think it would have been different with—someone you did love?" he enquired cautiously.

She gave him another quick thrilling glance.

"I don't know," she said.… "Maybe … I felt so different about you."

Their hands met on the settee and they both moved instinctively a little closer together.

Suddenly she jerked away from him, looking him in the eyes with her head thrown back and a smile of irony on her lips.

"Aren't we a couple of idiots?" she demanded.

"No!" he declared with fierce emphasis, and throwing an arm about her, pounced on her lips.

Just then a bell boy passed the door. They jerked apart and upright very self-consciously. Then they looked at each other and laughed. But their eyes quickly became deep and serious again, and their fingers entangled.

She sighed in mock exasperation.

"For Heaven's sake, say something!" she demanded. "We can't sit here and make eyes at each other all evening. Besides I'm compromising my priceless reputation. It's after ten o'clock. I've got to go." She rose, and held out her hand, which he took without saying anything.

"Good night," she said. "I think you were mean to come and camp on me this way … dumb as ever, I see … well, good night."

She went to the door, stopped and looked back, smiled and disappeared.

Ramon went down to the lobby and roamed all over the two floors which constituted the public part of the hotel. He looked at everything and smoked a great many cigarettes, thus restlessly whiling away an hour. Then he went to a writing room. He collected some telegrams and letters about him and appeared to be very busy. When a bell boy went by, he rapped sharply on the desk with a fifty-cent piece, and as the boy stopped, tossed it to him.

"Get me the key to 207!" he ordered sharply; then turned back to his imaginary business.

"Yes sir," said the boy. He returned in a few minutes with the key.

Ramon sat for a long moment looking at it, tremulous with a great anticipation. He was divided between a conviction that she expected him and a fear that she did not.… His fear proved groundless.



CHAPTER XXXIII

The next day they met for dinner at a little place near Washington Square where it was certain that none of Julia's friends ever went. Julia was a singularly contented-looking criminal. Never, Ramon thought had her skin looked more velvety, her eyes deeper or more serene. He was a trifle haggard, but happy, and both of them were hungry.

"Do you know?… I've made a discovery," she told him. "I haven't any conscience. I slept peacefully nearly all day, and when I waked up I considered the matter carefully … I don't believe that I have any proper appreciation of the enormity of what I've done at all. I have always thought that if anything like this ever happened to me I would go off and chloroform myself, but as a matter of fact I have no such intention … of course, though, it was not my fault in the least. You're so terrible!… I simply couldn't help myself, and I don't see what I can do now … that's comforting. But one thing is certain. We've got to be awfully careful. Thank Heaven, mother and Gordon are still in Florida and they won't dare to come North on Gordon's account until it gets a good deal warmer. But we must be careful. I'm not sorry, like I should be, but I sure am scared.…"

They sat for a long time after the meal, Ramon smoking a cigar, their knees touching under the table. He was filled with a vast contentment. He thought nothing of the troubled past, nor did he look into the obviously troubled future. He merely basked in the consciousness of a possession infinitely sweet.

Now began for them a life of clandestine adventure. Julia had a good many engagements, but she managed to give him some part of every day. They never met in the hotel, but usually took taxicabs separately and met in out-of-the-way parts of that great free wilderness of city. Ramon spent most of the time when he was not with her exploring for suitable meeting places. They became patrons of cellar restaurants in Greenwich Village, of French and Italian places far down town, of obscure Brooklyn hotels. If the regular fare at these establishments was not all they desired, Ramon would lavishly bribe the head waiter, call the proprietor into consultation if necessary, insist on getting what Julia wanted. He spent his money like a millionaire, and usually created the general impression that he was a wealthy foreigner. Every morning he had flowers sent to Julia's room. Often they would take a taxi and spend hours riding about the streets with the blinds drawn, locked in each others' arms.

For a week they were keenly, excitedly happy, living wholly in the joy of the moment. Then a flaw appeared upon the glowing perfect surface of their happiness.

"When is your husband coming back?" he enquired once, when they were riding through Central Park.

"I don't know. In a week or two. Why?"

"Because we must decide pretty soon what we're going to do."

"Do? What can we do?"

"We must decide where we're going. You must go with me somewhere. I'm not going to let you get away from me again … not even for a little while."

"But Ramon, how can we? I'm married. I can't go anywhere with you.…"

He seized her fiercely by the shoulders and held her away from him, looking into her eyes.

"Don't you love me, then?" he demanded.

"Ramon! You know I do!"

"Then you'll go. We can go to Mexico City, or South America … I'll sell out at home.…"

"O, Ramon … I can't. I haven't got the courage. Think of the fuss it would raise. And it would kill Gordon, I know it would.…"

"Damn Gordon!" he exclaimed, "he's not going to get in the way again! You're mine and I'm going to keep you. You will go. I'll take you!"

He had seized her in his arms, was holding her furiously tight. She put her arms around him, caressed his face with soft fluttering hands.

"Please, Ramon! Please don't make me miserable. Don't spoil the only happiness I ever had! I will go with you if ever I can, if I can get a divorce or something. But I can't run off like that. I haven't got it in me … please let me be happy!"

Her touch and her voice seemed to overcome his determination, seemed to sheer him of his strength. Weaker she was than he, but her charm was her power. It dragged him away from his thoughts and purposes, binding him to her and to the moment.… She drew his head down to her breast, found his lips with hers and so effectively cut his protests short.



The cream of his happiness was gone. Always when he was alone, he was thinking and planning how he could keep her. All of his possessiveness was aroused. He wanted her to have a baby. Somehow he felt that then his conquest would be complete, that then he would be at peace.…

He said nothing more to Julia because he saw that it was useless. He began to understand her a little. It was futile to ask her to make a decision, to take any initiative. She could hold out forever against pleas which involved an effort of the will on her part. And yet as he knew she could yield charmingly to pressure adroitly applied. If he had asked her to meet him in New York this way, he reflected, she would have been horrified, she would never have consented. But when he came, suddenly, that had been different. So it was now. If he could only form a really good plan, and then put her in a cab and take her … that would be the only way. The difficulty was to form the plan. He had capacity for sudden and decisive action. He lacked neither courage nor resolution. But when it came to making a plan which would require much time and patience, he found his limitations.

What could he do? he asked himself, not realizing that in formulating the question he acknowledged his impotence. If he went away and left her while he settled his affairs, she was lost as surely as a bird released from a cage. The idea of Mexico City allured him. But he had hardly enough money to take them there. How could he raise money on short notice? It would take time to settle his estate in New Mexico and get anything out of it.…

Two unrealized facts lay at the root of his difficulty. One was that he had no capacity for large and intricate plans, and the other was that he felt bound as by an invisible tether to the land where he had been born.

As he struggled with all these conflicting considerations and emotions, his head fairly ached with futile effort. He was glad to lay it upon Julia's soft bosom, to forget everything else again in the sweetness of a stolen moment.



CHAPTER XXXIV

He had been in New York about ten days when he awoke one morning near noon. An immense languor possessed him. He had been with Julia the night before and never had she been more charming, more abandoned.… He ordered his breakfast to be sent up, and then stretched out in bed and lit an expensive Russian cigarette. He had that love of sensuous indolence, which, together with its usual complement, the capacity for brief but violent action, marked him as a primitive man—one whom the regular labors and restraints of civilization would never fit.

His telephone bell rang, and when he took down the receiver he heard Julia's voice. It was not unusual for her to call him about this time, but what she told him now caused a blank and hapless look to come over his face. She was not in her room, but in another hotel.

"My husband got in this morning," she explained in a voice that was thin with misery and confusion. "I got his message last night, but I didn't tell you because I knew it would spoil our last time together, and I was afraid you would do something foolish.… Please say you're not angry. You know there was nothing for it. We couldn't have done any of those wild things you talked about. I'll always love you, honestly I will. Won't you even say goodby?…"

He at last did say goodby and hung up the receiver and went across the room and sat in an armchair. It suddenly struck him that he was very tired. He had not realized it before … how tired he was. There was none of the mad rebellion in him now that had filled him when first she had run away from him. Although he had never acknowledged it to himself he had been more than half prepared for this. He had told himself that he was going to do something bold and decisive, but he had procrastinated; he had never really formed a plan.

Weariness was his leading emotion. He was spent, physically and emotionally. He wanted her almost as much as ever. While she was no longer the remote and dazzling star she had been, the bond of flesh that had been created between them seemed a stronger, a more constant thing than blinding unsatisfied desire. But a great despair possessed him. There was so obviously nothing he could do. Just as his other disappointment had given him his first stinging impression of the irony of life, that cunningly builds a hope and then smashes it; so now he felt for the first time something of the helplessness of man in the current or his destiny, driven by deep-laid desires he seldom understands, and ruled by chances he can never calculate. From love a man learns life in quick and painful flashes.

Through the open window came the din of the New York street—purr and throb of innumerable engines, rumble and clatter of iron wheels, tapping of thousands of restless feet, making a blended current of sound upon which floated and tossed the shrillness of police whistles and newsboys' voices and auto horns. It had been the background of his life during memorable days. Once it had stirred his pulses, seeming a wild accompaniment to the song of his passion. Now it wearied him inexpressibly; it seemed to be hammering in his ears; he wanted to get away from it. He would go home that day.



As always on his trips across the continent he sat apathetically smoking through the wide green lushness of the middle west. Only when the cultivated lands gave way to barren hills and faint blue mountains peeping over far horizons did he turn to the window and forget his misery and his weariness. How it spoke to his heart, this country of his own! He who loved no man, who had gone to women with desire and come away with bitterness, loved a vast and barren land, baking in the sun. The sight of it quickened his pulses, softened and soothed his spirit. Like a good liquor it nursed and beautified whatever mood was in him. When he had come back to it a year before, it had spoken to him of hope, its mysterious distances had seemed full of promise and hidden possibility. And now that he came back to it with hopes broken, weary in mind and body, it seemed the very voice of rest. He thought of long cool nights in the mountains and of the lullaby that wind and water sing, of the soothing monotony of empty sunlit levels, of the cool caress of deep, green pools, of the sweet satisfaction that goes with physical weariness and a full belly and a bed upon the ground.

But when on the last morning of his journey he waked up within a hundred miles of home, and less than half that far from his own mountain lands, his new-found comfort quickly changed to a keen anxiety. For he saw at a glance that the country was under the blight of drought. The hills that should have borne a good crop of gramma grass at this time of the year, if the rains had been even fair, were nothing but bare red earth from which the rocks and the great roots of the pinion trees stood out like the bones of a starving animal. Here and there on the hillsides he could see a scrubby pine that had died, its needles turned rust-red—the sure sign of a serious drought.

During the half month that he had been gone he had thought not once of his affairs at home. The moment had absorbed him completely. Now it all came back to him suddenly. When he had left, the promise of the season had been good. It had not rained for more than a week, but everyone had been expecting rain every day. It was clear to him that the needed rain had never come. And he knew just what that meant to him. It meant that he had lost lambs and ewes, that he would have no money this year with which to meet his notes at the bank. He sank deep in despair and disgust again. Not only was the assault on his fortunes a serious one, but he felt little inclined to meet it. He was weary of struggle. He saw before him a long slow fight to get on his feet again, with the chance of ultimate failure if he had another bad year.

The Mexicans firmly believe, in the face of much evidence to the contrary, that seven wet years are always followed by seven dry ones. He had heard the saying gravely repeated many times. He more than half believed it. And he knew that for a good many years, perhaps as many as six or seven, the rains had been remarkably good. He was intelligent, but superstition was bred in his bones. Like all men of a primitive type he had a strong tendency to believe in fortune as a deliberate force in the affairs of men. It seemed clear to him now, in his depressed and exhausted condition, that bad luck had marked him for its prey.



CHAPTER XXXV

His forebodings were confirmed in detail the next morning when Cortez came into his office, his face wrinkled with worry and darkened by exposure to the weather. He was angry too.

"Por Dios, man! To go off like that and not even leave me an address. If I could have gotten more money to hire men I might have saved some of them … yes, more than half of the lambs died, and many of the ewes. There is nothing to do now. They are on the best of the range, and it has begun to rain in the mountains. But it is too bad. It cost you many thousands … that trip to New York."

Ramon gave Cortez a cigar to soothe his sensibilities, thanked him with dignity for his loyal services, and sent him away. Then he put on his hat and went outside to walk and think.

The town seemed to him quiet as though half-deserted. This was partly by contrast with the place of din which he had just left, and partly because this was the dull season, when the first hot spell of summer drove many away from the town and kept those who remained in their houses most of the day. The sandy streets caught the sun and cherished it in a merciless glare. They were baked so hot that barefoot urchins hopped gingerly from one patch of shade to the next. In the numerous vacant lots rank jungles of weeds languished in the dry heat, and long blue-tailed lizards, veritable heat-sprites, emerged to frolic and doze on deserted sidewalks. The leaves of the cottonwoods hung limp, and the white downy tufts that carried their seeds everywhere drifted and swam in the shimmering air. The river had shrunk to a string of shallow pools in a sandy plain, the irrigation ditches were empty, and in Old Town the Mexicans were asking God for rain by carrying an image of the Virgin Mary about on a litter and firing muskets into the air.

Quickly wearied, Ramon sat down on a shaded bench in the park and tried to think out his situation and to decide what he should do. The easy way was to sell out, pay his debts, provide for his mother and sister and with what was left go his own way—buy a little ranch perhaps in the mountains or in the valley where he could live in peace and do as he pleased. Wearied as he was by struggle and disappointment, this prospect allured him, and yet he could not quite accept it. He felt vaguely the fact that in selling his lands, he would be selling out to fate, he would be surrendering to MacDougall, to the gringos, he would be renouncing all his high hopes and dreams. His mountain lands, with their steadily increasing value, the power they gave him, would make of his life a thing of possibilities—an adventure. Settled on a little ranch somewhere, his whole story would be told in one of its years.

This he did not reason clearly, but the emotional struggle within him was therefore all the stronger. It was his old struggle in another guise—the struggle between the primitive being in him and the civilized, between earth and the world of men. Each of them in turn filled his mind with images and emotions, and he was impotent to judge between them.

His being was fairly rooted in the soil, and the animal happiness it offered—the free play of instinct, the sweetness of being physically and emotionally at peace with environment—was the only happiness he had ever known. Vaguely yet surely he had felt the world of men and works, the artificial world, to contain something larger and more beautiful than this. Julia Roth had been to him a stimulating symbol of this higher, this more desirable thing. His love for her had been the soil in which his aspirations had grown. That love had turned to bitterness and lust, and his aspirations had led him among greeds and fears and struggles that differed from those of the wild things only in that they were covert and devious, lacking the free beauty of instinct fearlessly followed and the dignity of open battle. Of civilization he had encountered only the raw and ugly edge, which is uglier than savagery. He knew no more of the true spirit of it than a man who has camped in a farmer's back pasture knows of the true spirit of wildness. It had treated him without mercy and brought out the worst of him. And yet because he had once loved and dreamed he could not go back to the easy but limited satisfactions of the soil and be wholly content.

So he could not make up his mind at first to surrender, but in the next few days one thing after another came to tempt him that way. MacDougall made him an offer for his lands which to his surprise was a little better than the last one. He learned afterward that the over-shrewd lawyer had misinterpreted his trip to New York, imagining that he had gone there to interest eastern capital in his lands.

His mother and sister were two very cogent arguments in favour of selling. The Dona Delcasar, a simple and vain old lady, now regarded herself as a woman of wealth, and was always after him for money. Her ambition was to build a house in the Highlands and serve tea at four o'clock (although it was thick chocolate she liked) and break into society. His one discussion of the matter with her was a bitter experience.

"Holy Mary!" she exclaimed in her shrill Spanish, when he broached a plan of retrenchment, "What a son I have! You spend thousands on yourself, chasing women and buying automobiles, and now you want us to spend the rest of our lives in this old house and walk to church so that you can make it up. God, but men are selfish!"

He saw that if he tried to save money and make a fight for his lands he would have to struggle not only with MacDougall and the weather, but with two ignorant, ambitious and sharp-tongued women. And family pride here fought against him. He did not want to see his women folk go shabbily in the town. He wanted them to have their brick house and their tea parties, and to uphold the name of Delcasar as well as they might.

One day while he was still struggling with his problem he went to look at a ranch that was offered for sale in the valley a few miles north of town. It was this place more than anything else which decided him. The old house had been built by one of his ancestors almost a hundred years before, and had then been the seat of an estate which embraced all the valley and mesa lands for miles in every direction. It had changed hands several times and there were now but a few hundred acres. The woodwork of the house was in bad repair, but its adobe walls, three feet thick, were firm as ever. There were still traces of the adobe stockade behind it, with walls ten feet high, and the building which had housed the peones was still standing, now filled with fragrant hay. In front of it stood an old cedar post with rusty iron rings to which the recalcitrant field hands had been bound for beating.

Every detail of this home of his forefathers stirred his emotions. The ancient cottonwood trees in front of the house with their deep, welcome shade and the soft voices of courting doves among the leaves; the alfalfa fields heavy with purple blossom, ripe for cutting; the orchard of old apple trees and thickets of Indian plum run wild; the neglected vineyard that could be made to yield several barrels of red wine—all of these things spoke to him with subtle voices. To trade his heritage for this was to trade hope and hazard for monotonous ease; but with the smell of the yielding earth in his nostrils, he no more thought of this than a man in love thinks of the long restraints and irks of marriage when the kiss of his woman is on his lips.



CHAPTER XXXVI

Ramon's life on his farm quickly fell into a routine that was for the most part pleasant. He hired an old woman to do his cooking and washing, and a man to work on the place. Other men he hired as he needed them, and he spent most of his days working with them as a foreman.

He attended to the business of farming ably. The trees of the old orchard he pruned and sprayed and he set out new ones. He put his idle land under irrigation and planted it in corn and alfalfa. He set out beds of strawberries and asparagus. He bought blooded livestock and chickens. He put his fences in repair and painted the woodwork of his house. The creative energy that was in him had at last found an outlet which was congenial though somewhat picayune. For the place was small and easily handled. As the fall came on, and his crops had been gathered and the work of irrigation was over for the season, he found himself looking about restlessly for something to do. On Saturday nights he generally went to town, had dinner with his mother and sister, and spent the evening drinking beer and playing pool. But he felt increasingly out of place in the town; his visits there were prompted more by filial duty and the need of something to break the monotony of his week than by a real sense of pleasure in them.

He was still caring for Catalina on the ranch up the valley, and when the woman who had been doing his work left him, he decided to bring the girl to his place and let her earn her keep by cooking and washing. He no longer felt any interest in her, and thought that perhaps she would marry Juan Cardenas, the man who milked his cows and chopped wood for him. But Catalina showed no interest in Juan. Instead, she emphatically rejected all his advances, and displayed an abject, squaw-like devotion to Ramon's welfare. Everything possible was done for his comfort without his asking. The infant, now almost a year old, was trained not to cry in his presence, and acquired a certain awe of him, watching him with large solemn eyes whenever he was about. Ramon, reflecting that this was his son, set out to make the baby's acquaintance, and became quite fond of it. He often played with it in the evening.

He paid Catalina regular wages and she spent most of the money on clothes. When she prepared herself for Church on Sunday she was a truly terrible spectacle, clad in an ill-fitting ready-made suit of brilliant colour, and wearing a cheap hat on which a dead parrot sprawled among artificial poppies, while her swarthy face, heavily powdered, took on a purple tinge. But about the place, dressed in clean calico, with a shawl over her shoulders, she was really pretty. Her figure was a good one of peasant type, and the acquisition of some shoes which fitted her revealed the fact that she had inherited from her remote Castilian ancestry a small and shapely foot and ankle.

Ramon could not help noticing all of these things, and so gradually he became aware of Catalina again as a desirable woman, and one whom it was easy for him to take.

After this his animal contentment was deeper than ever. He did not go to town so often, for one of the restlessnesses which had driven him there was removed. Often for weeks at a stretch he would not go at all unless it was necessary to get some tools or supplies for the farm. Then rather than take any of his men away from work, he would himself hitch up a team and drive the five miles. Sitting hunched over on the spring-seat of a big farm wagon, clad in overalls and a print shirt, with a wide hat tilted against the sun and a cigarette dangling from his lips, he was indistinguishable from any other paisano on the road. This change in appearance was helped by the fact that he had grown a heavy moustache. Often, as he drove through the streets of the town, he would pass acquaintances who did not recognize him, and he was just as well satisfied that they did not.

As is the way of unreflecting men, Ramon formed no definite opinion of his life, but liked it more or less according to the mood that was in him. There were bright, cool days that fall when, lacking work to do, he took his shot-gun and a saddle horse and went for long rambles. Sometimes he would follow the river northward, stalking the flocks of teal and mallards that dozed on the sandbars in the wide, muddy stream, perhaps killing three or four fat birds. Other times he went to the foot of the mountains and hunted the blue quail and cotton tail rabbits in the arroyos of the foot-hills. Once he and his man loaded a wagon with food and blankets and drove forty miles to a canyon where they killed a big black-tail buck, and brought him back in high triumph.

Returning from such trips full of healthy hunger and weariness, to find his hot supper and his woman waiting for him, Ramon would doze off happily, every want of his physical being satisfied, feeling that life was good.… But there were other nights when a strange restlessness possessed him, when he lay miserably awake through long dark hours. The silence of the black valley was emphasized now and then by the doleful voices of dogs that answered each other across the sleeping miles. At such times he felt as though he had been caught in a trap. He saw in imagination the endless unvaried chain of his days stretching before him, and he rebelled against it and knew not how to break it. His experience of life was comparatively little and he was no philosopher. He did not know definitely either what was the matter with him or what he wanted. But he had tasted high aspiration, and desire bright and transforming, and wild sweet joy.… These things had been taken away, and now life narrowed steadily before him like a blind canyon that pierces a mountain range. The trail at the bottom was easy enough to follow, but the walls drew ever closer and became more impassable, and what was the end?…



This sense of dissatisfaction reached its futile crux one day in the spring when he received a letter from Julia—the last he was ever to get. The sight and scent of it stirred him as they always had done, filling him with poignant painful memories.

"This is really the last time I'll ever bother you," she wrote, "but I do want to know what has happened to you, and how you feel about things. I can't forget. All our troubles seem to have worn some sort of a permanent groove in my poor brain, and I believe the thought of you will be there till the day of my death.

"As, for me, I'm in society up to my eyes, and absolutely without the courage or energy to climb out. Those days in New York were the first and the last of my freedom. Now I've been introduced to everybody, and I have an engagement book that tells me what I'm going to do whether I want to or not for three weeks ahead. I'm a model of conduct and propriety for the simple reason that I can't travel over a block without everybody that I know finding out about it.

"Of course it hasn't all been a bore. I have had some fun, and I've met some really interesting people. I've gotten used to being married and my husband treats me kindly and gives me a good home. Sounds as if I was a kitten, doesn't it? Well, I have very much the same sort of life as a kitten, but a kitten has no imagination and it has never been in love. Sometimes I think that I can't stand it any longer. It seems to me that I'm not really living, as I used to imagine I would, but just being dragged through life by circumstances and other people—I don't know what all. I still have desperate plans and ideas once in a while, but of course, I never do anything. When you come right down to it, what can I do?"

Ramon read this letter sitting on the sunny side of his house with his heels under him and his back against the wall—a position any Mexican can hold for hours. When he had finished it he sat motionless for a long time, painfully going over the past, trying ineptly to discover what had been the matter with it. More acutely than ever before he felt the cruel guerdon of youth—the contrast between the promise of life and its fulfillment. He felt that he ought to do something, that he ought not to submit. But somehow all the doors that led out of his present narrow way into wider fields seemed closed. There was no longer any entrancing vista to tempt him. Mentally he repeated her query, What could he do?

His thoughts went round and round and got nowhere. The spring sunshine soaked into his body. A faint hum of early insects lulled him, and to his nostrils came the scent of new-turned earth and manure from the garden where his man was working. He grew drowsy; his dissatisfaction simmered down to a vague ache in the background of his consciousness. Idly he tore the letter to little bits.



THE END



EXTRA PAGES



The Blood of the Conquerors



NEW BORZOI NOVELS FALL, 1921

PAN Knut Hamsun DREAMERS Knut Hamsun THE TORTOISE Mary Borden THE CHINA SHOP G. B. Stern THE BRIARY-BUSH Floyd Dell DEADLOCK Dorothy Richardson THE OTHER MAGIC E. L. Grant-Watson WHITE SHOULDERS George Kibbe Turner THE CHARMED CIRCLE Edward Alden Jewell THE BLOOD OF THE CONQUERORS Harvey Fergusson



The Blood of the Conquerors



ERRATA

CHAPTER II Changed: they were *untamable*, but boys To: they were *untameable*, but boys

CHAPTER II Changed: adventures were *comoposed* and sung To: adventures were *composed* and sung

CHAPTER IV Changed: your name," she admitted*,* To: your name," she admitted*.*

CHAPTER V Changed: only all-night *resturant*. Here he To: only all-night *restaurant*. Here he

CHAPTER VII Changed: haunted by lizzards and rattlesnakes. To: haunted by *lizards* and rattlesnakes.

CHAPTER VIII Changed: CHAPTER VIII*.* To: CHAPTER VIII* *

CHAPTER XI Changed: the game*,* But the To: the game*.* But the

CHAPTER XV Changed: nights they *visted* the town's To: nights they *visited* the town's

CHAPTER XIX Changed: saved from *furthur* punishment. Meantime, To: saved from *further* punishment. Meantime,

CHAPTER XXXI Changed: own living.… *Its* not fair. To: own living.… *It's* not fair.

CHAPTER XXXII Changed: of course* *" she added To: of course*,*" she added

CHAPTER XXXII Changed: * *For Heaven's sake, say something!" To: *"*For Heaven's sake, say something!"

Page 2 Changed: Harvey *Furgusson* To: Harvey *Fergusson*

THE END