The Blood of the Conquerors 24 – Fergusson · Verses Across
Literature · Historical Fiction
The Blood of the Conquerors 24Chapter XXIV
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Literature · Historical Fiction
The Blood of the Conquerors 24
Chapter XXIV
FergussonEnglish
A few days later one bright morning Ramon was sitting in the sun before the door of his friend, Francisco Guiterrez, feeling still somewhat sore, but otherwise surprisingly well. Guiterrez, a young sheep-herder, held the position of coadjutor of the local penitente chapter, and one of his duties as such was to take the penitent to his house and care for him after the initiation. 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. The Senora Guiterrez, a pretty buxom young Mexican woman, had fed him on atole gruel and on all of the eggs which her small flock of scrub hens produced; the seven little dirty brown Guiterrez children had come in to marvel at him with their fingers in their mouths; the Guiterrez goats and dogs and chickens had wandered in and out of the room in a companionable way, as though seeking to make him feel at ease; and Guiterrez himself had spent his evenings sitting beside Ramon, smoking cigarettes and talking.
This time of idleness had not been wholly wasted, either, for it had come out in the course of conversation that Guiterrez had been offered a thousand dollars for his place by a man whom he did not know, but whom Ramon had easily identified as an agent of MacDougall. Tempted by an amount which he could scarcely conceive, Guiterrez was thinking seriously of accepting the offer.
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. Later, such lands as he needed in order to control the right-of-way, he would gain by lending money and taking mortgages. But he did not intend to cheat any one. Such Mexicans as he had to oust from their lands, he would locate elsewhere. He was filled with a large generosity, and with a real love for these, his people. He meant to dominate this country, but his pride demanded that no one should be poor or hungry in his domain. So now he argued the matter to Guiterrez with real sincerity.
“A thousand dollars? Por Dios, man! Don’t you know that this place is worth many thousand dollars to you?”
“How can it be worth many thousand?” Guiterrez demanded. “What have I here? A few acres of chile and corn, a little hay, some range for my goats, a few cherry trees, a house.… Many thousands? No.”
“You have here a home, amigo,” Ramon reminded him. “Do you know how long a thousand dollars would support you? A year, perhaps. Then you would have to work for other men the rest of your life. Here you are free and independent.”
Guiterrez said nothing, but he had obviously received a new idea, and was impressed. Ramon never returned to the direct argument, but he missed no chance to stimulate Guiterrez’s pride in his establishment.
“This is a good little house you have amigo,” he would observe. And Guiterrez would tell him that the house had been built by his grandfather, but that its walls were as firm as ever, and that he had been intending for several years to plaster it, but had never gotten time. Before he was out of bed, Ramon was reasonably sure that Guiterrez would never sell.
The house was indeed charmingly situated on a hillside at the foot of which a little clear trout stream, called Rio Gallinas, chuckled over the bright pebbles in its bed and ran to hide in thickets of willow.
Sitting on the portal, which ran the length of the house and consisted of a projection of the roof supported by rough pine logs, Ramon could look down the canyon to where it widened into a little valley that lost itself in the vast levels of the mesa. There thirsty sands swallowed the stream and not a sprig of green marred the harmony of grey and purple swimming in vivid light, reaching away to the horizon where faint blue mountains hung in drooping lines.
By turning his head, Ramon could look into the heart of the mountains whence the stream issued through a narrow canyon, with steep, forested ridges on either side, and little level glades along the water, set with tall, conical blue spruce trees, pines with their warm red boles, and little clumps of aspen with gleaming white stems, and trembling leaves of mingled gold and green.
Ramon spent many hours with his back against the wall, his knees drawn up under his chin, Mexican fashion, smoking and vaguely dreaming of the girl he loved and of the things he would do. The vast sun drenched landscape before him was too much a part of his life, too intimate a thing for him to appreciate its beauty, but after his struggles with doubt and desire, it filled him with an unaccountable contentment. Its warmth and brightness, its unchanging serenity, its ceaseless soft voices of wind and water, lulled his mind and comforted his senses. The country was like some great purring creature that let him lie in its bosom and filled his body with the warm steady throb of its untroubled strength.
After a week of recuperation, he bought a horse from Guiterrez for a pack animal, loaded it with bedding and provisions and rode away into the mountains. His task was now to find other men who had fallen under the influence of MacDougall, and to persuade them not to sell their lands. Some of them would be at their homes, but others would be with the sheep herds, scattered here and there in the high country. He faced long days of mountain wandering, and for all that he longed to be done with his task, this part of it was sweet to him.
