is establishment.

"This is a good little house you have _amigo_," he would observe. And
Guiterrez would tell him that the house had been built by his grandfather,
but that its walls were as firm as ever, and that he had been intending
for several years to plaster it, but had never gotten time. Before he was
out of bed, Ramon was reasonably sure that Guiterrez would never sell.

The house was indeed charmingly situated on a hillside at the foot of
which a little clear trout stream, called Rio Gallinas, chuckled over the
bright pebbles in its bed and ran to hide in thickets of willow.

Sitting on the _portal_, which ran the length of the house and consisted
of a projection of the roof supported by rough pine logs, Ramon could look
down the canyon to where it widened into a little valley that lost itself
in the vast levels of the _mesa_. There thirsty sands swallowed the stream
and not a sprig of green marred the harmony of grey and purple swimming in
vivid light, reaching away to the horizon where faint blue mountains hung
in drooping lines.

By turning his head, Ramon could look into the heart of the mountains
whence the stream issued through a narrow canyon, with steep, forested
ridges on either side, and little level glades along the water, set with
tall, conical blue spruce trees, pines with their warm red boles, and
little clumps of aspen with gleaming white stems, and trembling leaves of
mingled gold and green.

Ramon spent many hours with his back against the wall, his knees drawn up
under his chin, Mexican fashion, smoking and vaguely dreaming of the girl
he loved and of the things he would do. The vast sun drenched landscape
before him was too much a part of his life, too intimate a thing for him
to appreciate its beauty, but after his struggles with doubt and desire,
it filled him with an unaccountable contentment. Its warmth and
brightness, its unchanging serenity, its ceaseless soft voices of wind and
water, lulled his mind and comforted his senses. The country was like some
great purring creature that let him lie in its bosom and filled his body
with the warm steady throb of its untroubled strength.

After a week of recuperation, he bought a horse from Guiterrez for a pack
animal, loaded it with bedding and provisions and rode away into the
mountains. His task was now to find other men who had fallen under the
influence of MacDougall, and to persuade them not to sell their lands.
Some of them would be a