and bright,
making life suddenly intense and purposeful.

And she had meant so much to him besides love. To have won her would have
been to win a great victory over the gringos--over that civilization, alien
to him in race and temper, which antagonized and yet fascinated him, with
which he was forced to grapple for his life.

She was gone, he had lost her. Perhaps it was just as well, after all, he
told himself, speaking out of his pride and his courage. But in his heart
was a great bitterness. In his heart he felt that the gringos had beaten
one more Delcasar.

CHAPTER XXVIII

The next few days Ramon spent quietly and systematically drinking whisky.
This he did partly because he had a notion that it was an appropriate
thing to do under the circumstances, and partly because he had a genuine
need for something to jolt his mind out of its rut of misery. He was not
sociable in his cups, and did not seek company of either sex, inviting a
man to drink with him or accepting such an invitation only when he had to
do so. His favourite resort was the Silver Dollar Saloon, which was
furnished with tables set between low partitions, so that when he had one
of these booths to himself he enjoyed a considerable degree of isolation.
He drank carefully, like a Spaniard, never losing control of his feet or
of his eyes, taking always just enough to keep his mind away from
realities and filled with dreams. In these dreams Julia played a vivid and
delightful part. He imagined himself encountering her under all sorts of
circumstances, and always she was yielding, repentant, she was his. In a
dozen different ways he conquered her, taking in imagination, as men have
always done, what the reality had denied. Some of his fancies were
delightful and filled him with a sense of triumph, so that men glanced
curiously at the bright-eyed boy who sat there in his corner all alone,
absorbed and intent. But there were other times at night when his defeated
desire came and lay in his arms like an invisible unyielding succuba,
torturing, maddening, driving him back to the street to drink until
drunken sleep came with its sudden brutal mercy.

But after a few days alcohol began to have little effect upon him, except
that when he awoke his hands were all aflutter so that he spilled his
coffee and tore his newspaper. He felt sick and weary, his misery numbed
by many repetitions of its every twinge. A sure instinct