ve,
as did a good many others among the Dons, feeling that the old ways of
life in New Mexico were sure to change, and having the Spanish aversion to
any departure from tradition. But their fears were not realized, and life
went on as before. In 1865 the _peones_ and Indian slaves were formally
set free, but all of them immediately went deeply in debt to their former
masters and thus retained in effect the same status as before. So it
happened that in the seventies, when New York was growing into a
metropolis, and the factory system was fastening itself upon New England,
and the middle west was getting fat and populous and tame, life in the
Southwest remained much as it had been a century before.

Laws and governments were powerless there to change ways of life, as they
have always been, but two parallel bars of steel reaching across the
prairies brought change with them, and it was great and sudden. The
railroad reached the Rio Grande Valley early in the eighties, and it
smashed the colourful barbaric pattern of the old life as the ruthless
fist of an infidel might smash a stained glass window. The metropolis of
the northern valley in those days was a sleepy little _adobe_ town of a
few hundred people, reclining about its dusty _plaza_ near the river. The
railroad, scorning to notice it, passed a mile away. Forthwith a new town
began growing up between, the old one and the railroad. And this new town
was such a town as had never before been seen in all the Southwest. It was
built of wood and only half painted. It was ugly, noisy and raw. It was
populated largely by real estate agents, lawyers, politicians and
barkeepers. It cared little for joy, leisure, beauty or tradition. Its God
was money and its occupation was business.

This thing called business was utterly strange to the Delcasars and to all
of the other Dons. They were men of the saddle, fighting men, and traders
only in a primitive way. Business seemed to them a conspiracy to take
their lands and their goods away from them, and a remarkably successful
conspiracy. Debt and mortgage and speculation were the names of its
weapons. Some of the Dons, including many of the Delcasars, who were now a
very numerous family, owning each a comfortable homestead but no more,
sold out and went to Old Mexico. Many who stayed lost all they had in a
few years, and degenerated into petty politicians or small storekeepers.
Some clung to a bit of land and went on farming, making