The Girl of the Golden West | Page 8

couch and closed his eyes. The effort and excitement left him as white as a sheet. It seemed to the boy as if his father might be sinking into the last stupor, but after a while he opened his eyes and called for a glass of aguardiente.
With difficulty he gulped it down; then he said feebly:
"My boy, the only American that ever was good was your mother. She was an angel. All the rest of these cursed gringos are pigs;" and his voice growing stronger, he repeated: "Ay, pigs, hogs, swine!"
The son made no reply; his father went on:
"What have not these devils done to our country ever since they came here? At first we received them most hospitably; everything they wanted was gladly supplied to them. And what did they do in return for our kindness? Where now are our extensive ranchos--our large herds of cattle? They have managed to rob us of our lands through clever laws that we of California cannot understand; they have stolen from our people thousands and thousands of cattle! There is no infamy that--"
The young man hastened to interrupt him.
"You must not excite yourself, father," he said with solicitude. "They are unscrupulous--many of them, but all are not so."
"Bah!" ejaculated the old man; "the gringos are all alike. I hate them all, I--" The old man was unable to finish. He gasped for breath. But despite his son's entreaties to be calm, he presently cried out:
"Do you know who you are?" And not waiting for a reply he went on with: "Our name is one of the proudest in Spain--none better! The curse of a long line of ancestors will be upon you if you tamely submit--not make these Americans suffer for their seizure of this, our rightful land--our beautiful California!"
More anxiously than ever now the son regarded his father. His inspection left no doubt in his mind that the end could not be far off. With great earnestness he implored him to lie down; but the dying man shook his head and continued to grow more and more excited.
"Do you know who I am?" he demanded. "No--you think you do, but you don't. There was a time when I had plenty of money. It pleased me greatly to pay all your expenses--to see that you received the best education possible both at home and abroad. Then the gringos came. Little by little these cursed Americanos have taken all that I had from me. But as they have sown so shall they reap. I have taken my revenge, and you shall take more!" He paused to get his breath; then in a terrible voice he cried: "Yes, I have robbed--robbed! For the last three years, almost, your father has been a bandit!"
The son sprang to his feet.
"A bandit? You, father, a Ramerrez, a bandit?"
"Ay, a bandit, an outlaw, as you also will be when I am no more, and rob, rob, rob, these Americanos. It is my command and--you--have-- sworn . . ."
The son's eyes were rivetted upon his father's face as the old man fell back, completely exhausted, upon his couch of rawhides. With a strange conflict of emotions, the young man remained standing in silence for a few brief seconds that seemed like hours, while the pallor of death crept over the face before him, leaving no doubt that, in the solemnity of the moment his father had spoken nothing but the literal truth. It was a hideous avowal to hear from the dying lips of one whom from earliest childhood he had been taught to revere as the pattern of Spanish honour and nobility. And yet the thought now uppermost in young Ramerrez's mind was that oddly enough he had not been taken by surprise. Never by a single word had any one of his father's followers given him a hint of the truth. So absolute, so feudal was the old man's mastery over his men that not a whisper of his occupation had ever reached his son's ears. Nevertheless, he now told himself that in some curious, instinctive way, he had known,--or rather, had refused to know, putting off the hour of open avowal, shutting his eyes to the accumulating facts that day by day had silently spoken of lawlessness and peril. Three years, his father had just said; well, that explained how it was that no suspicions had ever awakened until after he had completed his education and returned home from his travels. But since then a child must have noted that something was wrong: the grim, sinister faces of the men, constantly on guard, as though the old hacienda were in a state of siege; the altered disposition of his father, always given to gloomy moods, but lately doubly silent and saturnine, full of strange savagery and