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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.
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.
The two strolled about the store, talking of the weather, politics, business, the old days—everything except what they were both thinking about. Alfego opened a box of cigars, and having lit a couple of these, they went out on the long porch and sat down on an old buggy seat to continue the conversation. Alfego admired Ramon’s horse and especially his silver-mounted saddle.
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. Ramon’s life on his farm quickly fell into a routine that was for the most part pleasant.
But Juan’s wife, who really loved him, came to Ramon’s office and embraced his knees and laughed and cried and swore that she would do his washing for nothing as long as she lived. For now she could visit her husband once a month and take him tortillas! Ramon gave her ten dollars and pushed her out the door. He had worked hard on the case. He felt old and weary and wanted to get drunk.
Three or four Mexican clerks were waiting upon as many Mexican customers, with much polite, low-voiced conversation, punctuated by long silences while the customers turned the goods over and over in their hands. Ramon’s entrance created a slight diversion. None of them knew him, for he had not been in that country for years, but all of them recognized that he was a person of weight and importance.
The ditch was this night full of swift water, which tore at the button willows on the bank and gurgled against the bridge timbers. As they crossed it the idea came into Ramon’s head that if a man were pushed into the brown water he would be swiftly carried under the bridge and drowned.
Ramon had not realized how drunk he was until he heard this warning. “O, go to hell, Sid!” he countered. “She’s as good as anybody … I guess I can bring anybody I want here.…” Sidney shook his head. “No use, no use,” he observed philosophically. “But it’s too bad!” Ramon’s own words sounded hollow to him.
This feeling was deepened by the fact that Conny seemed to be specially bent on defeating Ramon’s ambition to be alone with the girl.
He began to talk in the low monotonous voice of one accustomed to much chanting, and this droning seemed to have some hypnotic quality. It seemed to lull Ramon’s mind so that he could not think what he was going to say or do. The priest expressed his sympathy. He spoke of the great and good man the Don had been.
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