The Blood of the Conquerors

by Fergusson, Harvey

  Hence the riding parties and picnics of a few years before had given way to aggressively formal balls and receptions; but one form of entertainment that was indigenous had survived. This was known as a “mesa supper.” It might take place anywhere in the surrounding wilderness of mountain and desert. Several auto-loads of young folk would motor out, suitably chaperoned and laden with provisions. Beside some water hole or mountain stream fires would be built, steaks broiled and coffee brewed. Afterward [pg 68] there would be singing and story-telling about the fire, and romantic strolls by couples.

  It was one of these expeditions that furnished Ramon with his second opportunity in three weeks to be alone with Julia Roth. The party had journeyed to Los Ojuellos, where a spring of clear water bubbled up in the centre of the mesa. A grove of cottonwood trees shadowed the place, and there was an ancient adobe ruin which looked especially effective by moonlight.

  The persistent Conny Masters was a member of the party, but he was handicapped by the fact that he knew more about camp cookery than anyone else present. He had made a special study of Mexican dishes and had written an article about them which had been rejected by no less than twenty-seven magazines. He made a specialty of the enchilada, which is a delightful concoction of corn meal, eggs and chile, and he had perfected a recipe of his own for this dish which he had named the Conny Masters junior.

  As soon as the baskets were unpacked and the chaperones were safely anchored on rugs and blankets with their backs against trees, there was a general demand, strongly backed by Ramon, that Conny should cook supper. He was soon absorbed in the process, volubly explaining every step, while the others gathered about him and offered [pg 69] encouragement and humorous suggestion. But there was soon a gradual dispersion of the group, some going for wood and some for water, and others on errands unstated.

  Ramon found himself strolling under the cottonwoods with Julia. Neither of them had said anything. It was almost as though the tryst had been agreed upon before. She picked her way slowly among the tussocks of dried grass, her skirt daintily kilted. A faint but potent perfume from her hair and dress blew over him. He ventured to support her elbow with a reverent touch. Never had she seemed more desirable, nor yet, for some reason, more remote.

  Suddenly she stopped and looked up at the great desert stars.

  “Isn’t it big and beautiful?” she demanded. “And doesn’t it make you feel free? It’s never like this at home, somehow.”

  “What is it like where you live?” he enquired. He had a persistent desire to see into her life and understand it, but everything she told him only made her more than ever to him a being of mysterious origin and destiny.

  “It’s a funny little New York factory city with very staid ways,” she said. “You go to a dance at the country club every Saturday night and to tea parties and things in between. You fight, [pg 70] bleed and die for your social position and once in a while you stop and wonder why.… It’s a bore. You can see yourself going on doing the same thing till the day of your death.…”

  Her discontent with things as they are found ready sympathy.

  “That’s just the way it is here,” he said with conviction. “You can’t see anything ahead.”

  “Oh, I don’t think its the same here at all,” she protested. “This country’s so big and interesting. It’s different.”

  “Tell me how,” he demanded. “I haven’t seen anything interesting here since I got back,—except you.”

  She ignored the exception.

  “I can’t express it exactly. The people here are just like people everywhere else—most of them. But the country looks so big and unoccupied. And blue mountains are so alluring. There might be anything beyond them … adventures, opportunities.…”

  This idea was a bit too rarefied for Ramon, but he could agree about the mountains.

  “It’s a fine country,” he assented. “For those that own it.”

  “It’s just a feeling I have about it,” she went on, trying to express her own half-formulated idea. “But then I have that feeling about life in [pg 71] general, and there doesn’t seem to be anything in it. I mean the feeling that it’s full of thrilling things, but somehow you miss them all.”

  “I have felt something like that,” he admitted. “But I never could say it.”

  This discovery of an idea in common seemed somehow to bring them closer together. His hand tightened gently about her arm; almost unconsciously he drew her toward him. But she seemed to be all absorbed in the discussion.

  “You have no right to complain,” she told him. “A man can do something about it.”

  “Yes,” he agreed, speaking a reflection without stopping to put it in conventional language. “It must be hell to be a woman … excuse me … I mean.…”

  “Don’t apologize. It is—just that. A man at least has a fighting chance to escape boredom. But they won’t even let a woman fight. I wish I were a man.”

  “Well; I don’t,” he asserted with warmth, unconsciously tightening his hold upon her arm. “I can’t tell you how glad I am that you’re a woman.”

  “Oh, are you?” She looked up at him with challenging, provocative eyes.

  For an instant a kiss was imminent. It hovered between them like an invisible fairy presence [pg 72] of which they both were sweetly aware, and no one else.

  “Hey there! all you spooners!” came a jovial and irreverent voice from the vicinity of the camp fire. “Come and eat.”

  The moment was lost; the fairy presence gone. She turned with a little laugh, and they went in silence back to the fire. They were last to enter the circle of ruddy light, and all eyes were upon them. She was pink and self-conscious, looking at her feet and picking her way with exaggerated care. He was proud and elated. This, he knew, would couple their names in gossip, would make her partly his.

  * * *

  [pg 73]

  CHAPTER IX

  He wanted to call on her again, but he felt that he had been insulted and rejected by the Roths, and his pride fought against it. Unable to think for long of anything but Julia he fell into the habit of walking by her house at night, looking at its lighted windows and wondering what she was doing. Often he could see the moving figures and hear the laughter of some gay group about her, but he could not bring himself to go in and face the chilly disapproval of her family. At such times he felt an utter outcast, and sounded depths of misery he had never known before. For this was his first real love, and he loved in the helpless, desperate way of the Latin, without calculation or humour.

  One evening there was a gathering on the porch of the Roth house. She was there, sitting on the steps with three men about her. He could see the white blur of her frock and hear her funny little bubbling laugh above the deeper voices of the men. Having ascertained that neither Gordon Roth nor his mother was there, he summoned his courage and went in. She [pg 74] could not see who he was until he stood almost over her.

  “O, it’s you! I’m awfully glad.…” Their hands met and clung for a moment in the darkness. He sat down on the steps at her feet, and the conversation moved on without any assistance from him. He was now just as happy as he had been miserable a few minutes before.

  Presently two of the other men went away, but the third, who was Conny Masters, stayed. He talked volubly as ever, telling wonderful and sometimes incredible stories of things he had seen and done in his wanderings. Ramon said nothing. Julia responded less and less. Once she moved to drop the wrap from about her shoulders, and the alert Conny hastened to assist her. Ramon watched and envied with a thumping heart as he saw the gleam of her bare white shoulders, and realized that his rival might have touched them.

  Conny went on talking for half an hour with astonishing endurance and resourcefulness, but it became always more apparent that he was not captivating his audience. He had to laugh at his own humour and expatiate on his own thrills. Finally a silence fell upon the three, broken only by occasional commonplace remarks.

  “Well, I guess
it’s time to drift,” Conny observed at last, looking cautiously at his watch.

  [pg 75] This suggestion was neither seconded by Ramon nor opposed by Julia. The silence literally pushed Conny to his feet.

  “Going, Ramon? No? Well, Good night.” And he retired whistling in a way which showed his irritation more plainly than if he had sworn.

  The two impolite ones sat silent for a long moment. Ramon was trying to think of what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it. Finally without looking at her he said in a low husky voice.

  “You know … I love you.”

  There was more silence. At last he looked up and met her eyes. They were serious for the first time in his experience, and so was her usually mocking little mouth. Her face was transformed and dignified. More than ever she seemed a strange, high being. And yet he knew that now she was within his reach.… That he could kiss her lips … incredible.… And yet he did, and the kiss poured flame over them and welded them into each others’ arms.

  They heard Gordon Roth in the house coughing, the cough coming closer.

  She pushed him gently away.

  “Go now,” she whispered. “I love you … Ramon.”

  * * *

  [pg 76]

  CHAPTER X

  His conquest was far from giving him peace. Her kiss had transformed his high vague yearning into hot relentless desire. He wanted her. That became the one clear thing in life to him. Reflections and doubts were alien to his young and primitive spirit. He did not try to look far into the future. He only knew that to have her would be delight almost unimaginable and to lose her would be to lose everything.

  His attitude toward her changed. He claimed her more and more at dances. She did not want to dance with him so much because “people would talk,” but his will was harder than hers and to a great extent he had his way. He now called on her regularly too. He knew that she had fought hard for him against her family, and had won the privilege for him of calling “not too often.”

  “I’ve lied for you frightfully,” she confessed. “I told them I didn’t really care for you in the least, but I want to see you because you can tell such wonderful things about the country. So talk about the country whenever they’re listening. And don’t look at me the way you do.…”

  [pg 77] Mother and brother were alert and suspicious despite her assurance, and manœuvred with cool skill to keep the pair from being alone. Only rarely did he get the chance to kiss her—once when her brother, who was standing guard over the family treasure, was seized with a fit of coughing and had to leave the room, and again when her mother was called to the telephone. At such times she shrank away from him at first as though frightened by the intensity of the emotion she had created, but she never resisted. To him these brief and stolen embraces were almost intolerably sweet, like insufficient sips of water to a man burned up with thirst.

  She puzzled him as much as ever. When he was with her he felt as sure of her love as of his own existence. And yet she often sought to elude him. When he called up for engagements she objected and put him off. And she surrounded herself with other men as much as ever, and flirted gracefully with all of them, so that he was always feeling the sharp physical pangs of jealousy. Sometimes he felt egotistically sure that she was merely trying by these devices to provoke his desire the more, but at other times he thought her voice over the phone sounded doubtful and afraid, and he became wildly eager to get to her and make sure of her again.

  Just as her kiss had crystallized his feeling for [pg 78] her into driving desire, so it had focussed and intensified his discontent. Before he had been more or less resigned to wait for his fortune and the power he meant to make of it; now it seemed to him that unless he could achieve these things at once, they would never mean anything to him. For money was the one thing that would give him even a chance to win her. It was obviously useless to ask her to marry him poor. He would have nothing to bring against the certain opposition of her family. He could not run away with her. And indeed he was altogether too poor to support a wife if he had one, least of all a wife who had been carefully groomed and trained to capture a fortune.

  There was only one way. If he could go to her strong and rich, he felt sure that he could persuade her to go away with him, for he knew that she belonged to him when he was with her. He pictured himself going to her in a great motor car. Such a car had always been in his imagination the symbol of material strength. He felt sure he could destroy her doubts and hesitations. He would carry her away and she would be all and irrevocably his before any one could interfere or object.

  This dream filled and tortured his imagination. Its realization would mean not only fulfilment of his desire, but also revenge upon the Roths for [pg 79] the humiliations they had made him feel. It pushed everything else out of his mind—all consideration of other and possibly more feasible methods of pushing his suit. He came of a race of men who had dared and dominated, who had loved and fought, but had never learned how to work or to endure.

  When he gave himself up to his dream he was almost elated, but when he came to contemplate his actual circumstances, he fell into depths of discouragement and melancholy. His uncle stood like a rock between him and his desire. He thought of trying to borrow a few thousand dollars from old Diego, and of leaving the future to luck, but he was too intelligent long to entertain such a scheme. 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. And yet Ramon did not give up hope. He was worried, desperate and bitter, but not beaten. He had still that illogical faith in his own destiny which is the gift that makes men of action.

  At this time he heard particularly disquieting [pg 80] things about his uncle. Don Diego was reputed to be spending unusually large sums of money. As he generally had not much ready cash, this must mean either that he had sold land or that he had borrowed from MacDougall, in which case the land had doubtless been given as security. Once it was converted into cash in the hands of Diego, Ramon knew that his prospective fortune would swiftly vanish. He determined to watch the old man closely.

  He learned that Don Diego was playing poker every night in the back room of the White Camel pool hall. Gambling was supposed to be prohibited in the town, but this sanctum was regularly the scene for a game, which had the reputation of causing more money to change hands than any other in the southwest. Ramon hung about the White Camel evening after evening, trying to learn how much his uncle was losing. He would have liked to go and stand behind his chair and watch the game, but both etiquette and pride prevented him doing this. On two nights his uncle came out surrounded by a laughing crowd, a little bit tipsy, and was hurried into a cab. Ramon had no chance to speak either to him or to any one else who had been in the game. But the third night he came out alone, heavy with liquor, talking to himself. The other players had already gone out, laughing. The place was nearly [pg 81] deserted. The Don suddenly caught sight of Ramon and came to him, laying heavy hands on his shoulders, looking at him with bleary, tear-filled eyes.

  “My boy, my nephew,” he exclaimed in Spanish, his voice shaking with boozy emotion, “I am glad you are here. Come I must talk to you.” And steadied by Ramon he led the way to a bench in a corner. Here his manner suddenly changed. He threw back his head haughtily and slapped his knee.

  “I have lost five hundred dollars tonight,” he announced proudly. “What do I care? I am a rich man. I have lost a thousand dollars in the last three nights. That is nothing. I am rich.”

  He thumped his chest, looking around defiantly. Then he leaned forward in a confidential manner and lowered his voice.

  “But these gringos—they have gone away and left me. You saw them? Cabrones! They have got my money. That is all they want. My boy, al
l gringos are alike. They want nothing but money. They can hear the rattle of a peso as far as a burro can smell a bear. They are mean, stingy! Ah, my boy! It is not now as it was in the old days. Then money counted for nothing! Then a man could throw away his last dollar and there were always friends to give him more. But now your dollars are your only true [pg 82] friends, and when you have lost them, you are alone indeed. Ah, my boy! The old days were the best!” The old Don bent his head over his hands and wept.

  Ramon looked at him with a mighty disgust and with a resentment that filled his throat and made his head hot. He had never before realized how much broken by age and drink his uncle was. Before, he had suspected and feared that Don Diego was wasting his property; now he knew it.

  The Don presently looked up again with tear-filled eyes, and went on talking, holding Ramon by the lapel of the coat in a heavy tremulous grip. He talked for almost an hour, his senile mind wandering aimlessly through the scenes of his long and picturesque career. He would tell tales of his loves and battles of fifty years ago—tales full of lust and greed and excitement. He would come back to his immediate troubles and curse the gringos again for a pack of miserable dollar-mongers, who knew not the meaning of friendship. And again his mind would leap back irrelevantly to some woman he had loved or some man he had killed in the spacious days where his imagination dwelt. Ramon listened eagerly, hoping to learn something definite about the Don’s dealings with MacDougall, but the old man never touched upon this. He did tell one story to which Ramon listened with interest. He told [pg 83] how, twenty-five years before, he and another man named Cristobal Archulera had found a silver mine in the Guadelupe Mountains, and how he had cheated the other out of his interest by filing the claim in his own name. He told this as a capital joke, laughing and thumping his knee.