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The next morning the pack horse opened the exercises by rolling down a steep bank into the creek, plastering himself on the way from head to tail with a half gallon of high grade sorghum syrup which had been on top of the load. At this Ramon’s tortured nerves exploded and he jumped into the water after the floundering animal, belabouring it with a quirt, and cursing it richly in two languages.
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.
She was reputed to be both prettier and less approachable than most of her kind. Sidney Felberg had made a preliminary reconnaissance and a pessimistic report. “Nothing doing,” he said. “She’s got a husband somewhere and a notion she’s cut out for better things.… I’m off her!” This immediately provoked Ramon’s interest. He went to the lunch room at a time when he knew there would be few customers.
To disregard this custom would have been most unwise for an ambitious young man, and besides, Ramon’s mother clung tenaciously to the traditional Mexican ways, and she would not have tolerated any breach of them. At this moment she and her two daughters were likewise lying in their rooms, clad in new black silk and surrounded by other sorrowing females.
The region in which Ramon’s heritage lay was a typical part of this forgotten land. In the southern end of the Rocky Mountains, it was a country of great tilted mesas reaching above timber line, covered for the most part with heavy forests of pine and fir, with here and there great upland pastures swept clean by forest fires of long ago.
Each one of them would come into Ramon’s room and sit by his bedside and take his hand and express sympathy. Some of them would weep and some would groan, although all of them, like himself, were profoundly glad that the Don was dead. Ramon hoped that they would make their expressions brief. And later, he knew, all would gather in the room where the casket rested on two chairs.
He then put a slip noose around its upper lip and led it unmercifully, while Curtis encouraged it from behind with a rope-end. Like all Mexicans, they had little sympathy for horseflesh. These labours and hardships were Ramon’s salvation. The exercise and air restored his health and in fighting the difficulties of unlucky travel he relieved in some degree the rage against life that embittered him.
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