The Blood of the Conquerors | Page 2

home afforded
specially good opportunity for his habit of mental philandering. The
passengers were continually going up and down between the dining car
at one end of the train and the observation car at the other, so that all of
the women daily passed in review. They were an unusually attractive
lot, for most of the passengers were wealthy easterners on their way to
California. Ramon had never before seen together so many women of
the kind that devotes time and money and good taste to the business of
creating charm. Perfectly gowned and groomed, delicately scented,
they filled him with desire and with envy for the men who owned them.
There were two newly married couples among the passengers, and
several intense flirtations were under way before the train reached
Kansas City. Ramon felt as though he were a spectator at some
delightful carnival. He was lonely and restless, yet fascinated.
For no opportunity of becoming other than a spectator had come to him.
He had chosen without difficulty the girl whom he preferred, but had
only dared to admire her from afar. She was a little blonde person, not

more than twenty, with angelic grey eyes, hair of the colour of ripe
wheat and a complexion of perfect pink and white. The number of
different costumes which she managed to don in two days filled him
with amazement and gave her person an ever-varying charm and
interest. She appeared always accompanied by a very placid-looking
and portly woman, who was evidently her mother, and a tall,
cadaverous sick man, whose indifferent and pettish attitude toward her
seemed to indicate that he was either a brother or an uncle, for Ramon
felt sure that she was not married. She acquired no male attendants, but
sat most of the time very properly, if a little restlessly, with her two
companions. Once or twice Ramon felt her look upon him, but she
always turned it away when he glanced at her.
Whether because she was really beautiful in her own petite way, or
because she seemed so unattainable, or because her small blonde
daintiness had a peculiar appeal for him, Ramon soon reached a state of
conviction that she interested him more than any other girl he had ever
seen. He discreetly followed her about the train, watching for the
opportunity that never came, and consoling himself with the fact that
no one else seemed more fortunate in winning her favour than he. The
only strange male who attained to the privilege of addressing her was a
long-winded and elderly gentleman of the British perpetual-travelling
type, at least one representative of which is found on every
transcontinental train, and it was plain enough that he bored the girl.
Ramon took no interest in landscapes generally, but when he awoke on
the last morning of his journey and found himself once more in the
wide and desolate country of his birth, he was so deeply stirred and
interested that he forgot all about the girl. Devotion to one particular bit
of soil is a Mexican characteristic, and in Ramon it was highly
developed because he had spent so much of his life close to the earth.
Every summer of his boyhood he had been sent to one of the sheep
ranches which belonged to the various branches of his numerous family.
Each of these ranches was merely a headquarters where the sheep were
annually dipped and sheared and from which the herds set out on their
long wanderings across the open range. Often Ramon had followed
them--across the deserts where the heat shimmered and the yellow dust

hung like a great pale plume over the rippling backs of the herd, and up
to the summer range in the mountains where they fed above the clouds
in lush green pastures crowned with spires of rock and snow. He had
shared the beans and mutton and black coffee of the herders and had
gone to sleep on a pile of peltries to the evensong of the coyotes that
hung on the flanks of the herd. Hunting, fishing, wandering, he had
lived like a savage and found the life good.
It was this life of primitive freedom that he had longed for in his exile.
He had thought little of his family and less of his native town, but a
nostalgia for open spaces and free wanderings had been always with
him. He had come to hate the city with its hard walled-in ways and its
dirty air, and also the eastern country-side with its little green prettiness
surrounded by fences. He longed for a land where one can see for fifty
miles, and not a man or a house. He thought that alkaline dust on his
lips would taste sweet.
Now he saw again the scorched