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Updated: June 28, 2025
He knew that Father Lugaria had come to arrange for the mass over the body of Don Delcasar. He disliked Father Lugaria, and knew that the Father disliked him. This mutual antipathy was due to the fact that Ramon seldom went to Church. There were others of his generation who showed the same indifference toward religion, and this defection of youth was a thing which the Priests bitterly contested.
But he could use his influence with the natives to prevent MacDougall from buying. MacDougall was a gringo. The Mexicans hated him. He had been shot at. Ramon could “preach the race issue,” as the politicians put it. The important thing was to strengthen and assert his influence as a Mexican and a Delcasar. He must go to Arriba County, open the old ranch house he owned there, go among the people.
It had once been a fine equipage, and had been drawn by a spirited team in the days before Felipe Delcasar lost all his money, but now it had a look of decay, and the team consisted of a couple of rough coated, low-headed brutes, one of which was noticeably smaller than the other. The coachman was a ragged native who did odd jobs about the Delcasar house.
He was a sort of hero to the native people—a great fighter, a great lover—and songs about his adventures were composed and sung around the fires in sheep camps and by gangs of trackworkers. Don Diego, in a word, was a true Delcasar and a great man. Had he used his opportunities wisely he might have been a millionaire.
The Dona Delcasar, a ponderous and swarthy woman in voluminous black silk, became excited and stood up in the carriage, shouting shrill and useless directions to the coachman in Spanish. People began to laugh. Ramon roughly seized his mother by the arm and dragged her down. He was trembling with rage and embarassment.
“You are not like your uncle,” he assured the young man earnestly, in his formal Spanish. “You are generous, honourable. When your uncle is dead, you will repay me for the wrongs that I have suffered—no?” Ramon would always laugh at this. This night, in order to humour the old man, he asked him how much he thought the Delcasar estate owed him for his ancient wrong.
The couple consisted of his uncle, Diego Delcasar, and the wife of James MacDougall, the lawyer and real estate operator with whom the Don had formed a partnership, and whom Ramon believed to be systematically fleecing the old man. Don Diego was a big, paunchy Mexican with a smooth brown face, strikingly set off by fierce white whiskers.
The Don would likely have provided him with the money, and he would have done it by hypothecating more of the Delcasar lands to MacDougall. Then Ramon would have had to borrow more, and so on, until the lands upon which all his hopes and dreams were based had passed forever out of his reach. The thing seemed hopeless, for Don Diego might well live for many years.
Dona Ameliana Delcasar, a sister of Don Solomon, was responsible for another alien infusion which ultimately percolated all through the family, and has been thought by some to be responsible for the unusual mental ability of certain Delcasars. Dona Ameliana, a beautiful but somewhat unruly girl, went into a convent in Durango, Mexico, at the age of fifteen.
Its editorial writer was a former New York newspaperman of unusual abilities who had been driven to the Southwest by tuberculosis. In an editorial which was deplored by many prominent business men, he pointed out that unpunished murderers were all too common in the State. He cited several cases like this of Don Delcasar in which prominent men had been assassinated, and no arrest had followed.
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