ted 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 {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} 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 wa