CHAPTER XV
Ramon had always been rather a solitary figure in his own town. Although he belonged nominally to the bunch of young gringos, Jews and Mexicans, who foregathered at the White Camel Pool Hall, their amus.e.m.e.nts did not hold his interest very strongly. They played a picayune game of poker, which resulted in a tangled ma.s.s of debt; they went on occasional mild sprees, and on Sat.u.r.day nights they visited the towns red light district, hardy survivor of several vice crusades, where they danced with portly magdalenes in gaudy kimonos to the music of a mechanical piano, luxuriating in conscious wickedness.
All of this had seemed romantic and delightfully vicious to Ramon a few years before, but it soon palled on his restless and discontented spirit.
He had formed the habit of hunting alone, and had found adventures more to his taste. But now he found himself in company more than ever before. He was bid to every frolic that took place. In the White Camel he was often the centre of a small group, which included men older than himself who had never paid any attention to him before, but now addressed him with a certain deference. Although he understood well enough that most of the attentions paid him had an interested motive, he enjoyed the sense of leadership which these gatherings gave him. If he was not a real leader now, he intended to become one. He listened to what men said, watched them, and said little himself. He was quick to grasp the fact that a reputation for shrewdness and wisdom is made by the simple method of keeping the mouth shut.
He made many acquaintances among the new element which had recently come to town from the East in search of health or money, but he made no real friends because none of these men inspired him with respect. Only one man he attached to himself, and that one by the simple tie of money. His name was Antonio Cortez. He was a small, skinny, sallow Mexican with a great moustache, behind which he seemed to be discreetly hiding, and a consciously cunning eye. Of an old and once wealthy Spanish family, he had lost all of his money by reason of a lack of apt.i.tude for business, and made his living as a sort of professional political henchman. He was a bearer of secret messages, a maker of deals, an eavesdropper. The Latin apt.i.tude for intrigue he had in a high degree. He was capable of almost anything in the way of falsehood or evasion, but he had that great capacity for loyalty which is so often the virtue of weaklings.
I have known your family for many years, he told Ramon importantly, And I feel an interest in you, almost as though you were my own son. You need an older friend to advise you, to attend to details in the management of your great estate. You will probably go into politics and you need a political manager. As an old friend of your family I want to do these things for you. What do you say?
Ramon answered without any hesitation and prompted solely by intuition:
I thank you, friend, and I accept your offer.
He knew instinctively that he could trust this man and also dominate him.
It was just such a follower that he needed. Nothing was said about money, but on the first of the month Ramon mailed Cortez a check for a hundred dollars, and that became his regular salary.
CHAPTER XVI
About two weeks after the Dons funeral, Ramon received a summons which he had been vaguely expecting. He was asked by Mr. MacDougalls secretary over the telephone to call, whenever it would be convenient, at Mr.
MacDougalls office.
He knew just what this meant. MacDougall would try to make with him an arrangement somewhat similar to the one he had had with the Don. Ramon knew that he did not want such an arrangement on any terms. He felt confident that not one could swindle him, but at the same time he was half afraid of the Scotchman; he felt instinctively that MacDougall was a man for him to avoid. And besides, he intended to use his lands in his own way. He would sell part of them to the railroad, which was projected to be built through them, if he could get a good price; but the hunger for owning land, for dominating a part of the earth, was as much a part of him as his right hand. He wanted no modern business partnership. He wanted to be ___el patron,___ as so many Delcasars had been before him.
Here was a temptation to be dramatic, to hurl a picturesque defiance at the gringo. Ramon might have yielded to it a few months before. Sundry brave speeches flashed through his mind, as it was. But he resolutely put them aside. There was too much at stake his love. He determined to call on MacDougall promptly and to be polite.
MacDougall was a heavy, bald man of Scotch descent, and very true to type.
He had come to town from the East about fifteen years before with his wife and his two tall, raw-boned childrena boy and a girl. The family had been very poor. They had lived in a small _adobe_ house on the _mesa_. For ten years Mrs. MacDougall had done all of her own housework, including the washing; the two children had gone to school in clothes that seemed always too small for them; and MacDougall had laboured obscurely day and night in a small dark office. During these ten years the MacDougalls had been completely overlooked by local society, and if they felt any resentment they did not show it.
Meantime MacDougall had been systematically and laboriously laying the foundations of a fortune. His pa.s.sion was for land. He loaned money on land, chiefly to Mexicans, and he took mortgages on land in return for defending his Mexican clients, largely on criminal charges. Some of the land he farmed, and some he rented, but much of it lay idle, and the taxes he had to pay kept his family poor long after it might have been comfortable. But his lands rose steadily in value; he began selling, discreetly; and the MacDougalls came magnificently into their own.
MacDougall was now one of the wealthiest men in the State. In five years his way of living had undergone a great change. He owned a large brick house in the highlands and had several servants. The boy had gone to Harvard, and the girl to Va.s.sar. Neither of them was so gawky now, and both of them were much sought socially during their vacations at home.
MacDougall himself had undergone a marked change for a man past fifty. He had become a stylish dresser and looked younger. He drove to work in a large car with a chauffeur. In the early morning he went riding on the _mesa_, mounted on a big Kentucky fox-trotter, clad in English riding clothes, jouncing solemnly up and down on his flat saddle, and followed by a couple of carefully-laundered white poodles. On these expeditions he was a source of great edification and some amus.e.m.e.nt to the natives.
In the town he was a man of weight and influence, but the country Mexicans hated him. Once when he was looking over some lands recently acquired by the foreclosure of mortgages, a bullet had whistled close to his ear, and another had punctured the hood of his car. He now hired a man to do his outside work.
Thus both MacDougall and his children had thrived and developed on their wealth. Mrs. MacDougall, perhaps, had been the sacrifice. She remained a tall, thin, pale, tired-looking woman with large hands that were a record of toil. She laboured at her new social duties and pleasures in exactly the same spirit that she had formerly laboured at the wash tub.
MacDougalls offices now occupied all of the ground floor of a large new building which he had built. Like everything else of his authorship this building represented a determined effort to lend the town an air of Eastern elegance. It was finished in an imitation of white marble and the offices had large plate gla.s.s windows which bore in gilt letters the legend: MacDougall Land and Cattle Company, Inc. Within, half a dozen girls in gla.s.s cages could be seen working at typewriters and adding machines, while a cashier occupied a little office of his own with a large safe at his back, a little bra.s.s grating in front of him, and a revolver visible not far from his right hand.
The creator of this magnificence sat behind a gla.s.stop desk at the far end of a large and sunny office with a bare and slippery floor. Many a Mexican beggar for mercy, with a mortgage on his home, had walked across this forbidding expanse of polished hardwood toward the big man with the merciless eye, as fearfully as ever a _peon_, sentenced to forty lashes and salt in his wounds, approached the seat of his owner to plead for a whole skin. Truly, the weak can but change masters.
This morning MacDougall was all affability. As he stood up behind his desk, clad in a light grey suit, large and ruddy, radiant of health and prosperity, he was impressive, almost splendid. Only the eyes, small and closeset, revealed the worried and calculating spirit of the man.
Mr. Delcasar, he said when they had shaken hands and sat down, I am glad to welcome you to this office, and I hope to see you here many times more. I will not waste time, for we are both busy men. I asked you to come here because I want to suggest a sort of informal partnership between us, such as I had with your late uncle, one of my best friends. I believe my plan will be for the best interests of both of us. I suppose you know about what the arrangement was between the Don and myself?
No; not in detail, Ramon confessed. He felt MacDougalls power at once.
Facing the man was a different matter from planning an interview with him when alone. But he retained sense enough to let MacDougall do the talking.
Have a cigar, the great man continued, full of sweetness, pushing a large and fragrant box of perfectos across the desk. I will outline the situation to you briefly, as I see it. Nothing could have seemed more frank and friendly than his manner.
As you doubtless know, he went on, your estate includes a large area of mountain and _mesa_ landa little more than nine thousand acres I believenorth and west of the San Antonio River in Arriba County. I own nearly as much land on the east side of the river. The valley itself is owned by a number of natives in small farming tracts.
I believe your estate also includes a few small parcels of land in the valley, but not enough, you understand, to be of much value by itself.
Your uncle also owned a few tracts in the valley east of the river which he transferred to me, for a consideration, because they ab.u.t.ted upon my holdings.
Now the valley, as I scarcely need tell you, is the key to the situation.
In the first place, if the country is to be properly developed as sheep and cattle range, the valley will furnish the farming land upon which hay for winter use can be raised, and it also furnishes some good winter range. Moreover, it is now an open secret that the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad proposes building a branch line through that country and into the San Juan Valley. No surveys have been made, but it is certain that the road must follow the San Antonio to the top of the divide. There is no other way through. I became aware of this project some time ago through my eastern connections, and told your uncle about it. He and I joined forces for the purpose of gaining control of the San Antonio Valley, and of the railroad right-of-way.
The proposition is a singularly attractive one. Not only could the right-of-way be sold for a very large sum, but we would afterward own a splendid bit of cattle range, with farming land in the valley, and with a railroad running through the centre of it. There is nothing less than a fortune to be made in the San Antonio Valley, Mr. Delcasar.
And the lands in the valley can be acquired. Some of the small owners will sell outright. Furthermore, they are all frequently in need of money, especially during dry years when the crops are not good. By advancing loans judiciously, and taking land as security, t.i.tle can often be acquired. I daresay you are not wholly unfamiliar with the method.
This work, Mr. Delcasar, requires large capital, which I can command. It also requires certain things which you have in an unusual degree. You are of Spanish descent, you speak the language fluently. You have political and family prestige among the natives. All of this will be of great service in persuading the natives to sell, and in getting the necessary information about land t.i.tles, which, as you know, requires much research in old Spanish Church records and much interviewing of the natives themselves.
In the actual making of purchases, my name need not appear. In fact, I think it is very desirable that it should not appear. But understand that I will furnish absolutely all of the capital for the enterprise. I am offering you, Mr. Delcasar, an opportunity to make a fortune without investing a cent, and I feel that I can count upon your acceptance.
At the close of this discourse, Ramon felt like a surf-bather who has been overwhelmed by a great and sudden wave and comes up gasping for breath and struggling for a foothold. Never had he heard anything so brilliantly plausible, for never before had he come into contact with a good mind in full action. Yet he regained his balance in a moment. He was accustomed to act by intuition, not by logic, and his intuition was all against accepting MacDougalls offer. He was not deceived by the Scotchmans show of friendship and beneficence; he himself had an apt.i.tude for pretence, and he understood it better than he would have understood sincerity. He knew that whether he formed this partnership or not, there was sure to be a struggle between him and MacDougall for the dominance of the San Antonio Valley. And his instinct was to stand free and fight; not to come to grips, MacDougall was a stronger man than he. The one advantage which he hadhis influence over the nativeshe must keep in his own hands, and not let his adversary turn it against him.
He took his cigar out of his mouth, looked at it a moment, and cleared his throat.
Mr. MacDougall, he said slowly, this offer makes me proud. That you should have so much confidence in me as to wish to make me your partner is most gratifying. I am sorry that I must refuse. I have other plans.
MacDougall nodded, interrupting. This was evidently a contingency he had calculated.
Im sorry, Mr. Delcasar. I had hoped to be permanently a.s.sociated with you in this venture. But I think I understand. You are young. Perhaps marriage, a home are your immediate objects, and you need cash at once, rather than a somewhat distant prospect of greater wealth. In that case I think I can meet your wishes. I am prepared to make you a good offer for all of your holdings in the valley, and those immediately adjoining it.
The exact amount I cannot state at this moment, but I feel sure we could agree as to price.
Ramon was taken aback by the promptness of the counter, confused, forced to think. Money was a thing he wanted badly. He had little cash. If MacDougall would give him fifty thousand, he could go with Julia anywhere.
He would be free. But again the inward prompting, sure and imperative, said no. He wanted the girl above all things. But he wanted land, too. His was the large and confident greed of youth. And he could have the girl without making this concession. MacDougall wanted to take the best of his land and push him out of the game as a weakling, a negligible. He wouldnt submit. He would fight, and in his own way. What he wanted now was to end the interview, to get away from this battering, formidable opponent. He rose.
I will think it over, Mr. MacDougall, he said. And meantime, if you will send me an offer in writing, I will appreciate it.
Some of the affability faded from MacDougalls face as he too rose, and the worried look in his little grey eyes intensified, as though he sensed the fact that this was an evasion. None-the-less he said good-bye cordially and promised to write the letter.
Ramon went back to his office, his mind stimulated, working intensely.
Never before had he thought so clearly and purposefully. He got out an old government map of Arriba County, and with the aid of the deeds in the safe which contained all his uncles important papers, he managed to mark off his holdings. The whole situation became as clear to him as a checker game. He owned a bit of land in the valley which ran all the way across it, and far out upon the _mesa_ in a long narrow strip. That was the way land holdings were always divided under the Spanish lawinto strips a few hundred feet wide, and sometimes as much as fourteen miles long. This strip would in all probability be vital to the proposed right-of-way. It explained MacDougalls eagerness to take him as a partner or else to buy him out. By holding it, he would hold the key to the situation.
In order really to dominate the country and to make his property grow in value he would have to own more of the valley. And he could not get money enough to buy except very slowly. 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 a.s.sert 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. He must gain a real ascendency.