The Blood of the Conquerors 16 – Fergusson · Verses Across
Literature · Historical Fiction
The Blood of the Conquerors 16Chapter XVI
18
Literature · Historical Fiction
The Blood of the Conquerors 16
Chapter XVI
FergussonEnglish
About two weeks after the Don’s funeral, Ramon received a summons which he had been vaguely expecting. He was asked by Mr. MacDougall’s secretary over the telephone to call, whenever it would be convenient, at Mr. MacDougall’s 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 children—a 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 passion 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 Vassar. 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 amusement 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.
MacDougall’s 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 glass windows which bore in gilt letters the legend: “MacDougall Land and Cattle Company, Inc.” Within, half a dozen girls in glass 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 brass grating in front of him, and a revolver visible not far from his right hand.
The creator of this magnificence sat behind a glasstop 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 MacDougall’s 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 land—a little more than nine thousand acres I believe—north 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 abutted 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, title 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 titles, 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 MacDougall’s offer. He was not deceived by the Scotchman’s show of friendship and beneficence; he himself had an aptitude 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 had—his influence over the natives—he 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.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Delcasar. I had hoped to be permanently associated 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 wouldn’t 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 MacDougall’s 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 uncle’s 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 law—into 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 MacDougall’s 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 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. He must gain a real ascendency. He knew how to do it. It was his birthright. He was full of fight and ambition, confident, elated. The way was clear before him. Tomorrow he would go to Julia.
