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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.
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.
He meant to dominate this country, 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?
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.
Bitter smoke on an empty stomach might be appropriately substituted for the last straw of the proverb when the proverb has to do with hungry Mexicans. Most of the recumbent vaqueros merely cursed a little deeper and drew their serapes closer, but José Guiterrez grunted, threw off his blanket, and approached the fire.
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.
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 he was out of bed, Ramon was reasonably sure that Guiterrez would never sell.
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 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.
When Sancho heard of this audacious libel, he became red in the face with indignation. "A nice sort of historian, indeed!" he burst out. "He must know a deal about our affairs when he calls my wife, Teresa Panza, Mari Guiterrez! Take the book again, señor, and see whether I am in it and whether he has changed my name!"
Don Quixote took it and glanced it through, and after having read a few pages, he returned it to the gentleman, with the remark that he had already discovered three things in the book that ought to be censured; and he said that when an author could make such a colossal mistake as to speak of Sancho's wife as Mari Guiterrez, one would be likely to doubt the veracity of every other statement of his in the book.
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