esides, girls were relatively scarce in
the West because of the great number of men who came from the East.
Competition for their favours was keen, and he could not compete
successfully because he had so little money.

The fair held but one new experience for him, and that was the Montezuma
ball. This took place on the evening of the last day, and was an exclusive
invitation event, designed to give elegance to the fair by bringing
together prominent persons from all parts of the state. Ramon had never
attended a Montezuma ball, as he had been considered a mere boy before his
departure for college and had not owned a dress suit. But this lack had
now been supplied, and he had obtained an invitation through the Governor
of the State, who happened to be a Mexican.

He went to the ball with his mother and his eldest sister in a carriage
which had been among the family possessions for about a quarter of a
century. It had once been a fine equipage, and had been drawn by a
spirited team in the days before Felipe Delcasar lost all his money, but
now it had a look of decay, and the team consisted of a couple of rough
coated, low-headed brutes, one of which was noticeably smaller than the
other. The coachman was a ragged native who did odd jobs about the
Delcasar house.

The Montezuma ball took place in the new Eldorado Hotel which had recently
been built by the railroad company for the entertainment of its
transcontinental passengers. It was not a beautiful building, but it was
an apt expression of the town's personality. Designed in the ancient style
of the early Spanish missions, long, low and sprawling, with deep
verandahs, odd little towers and arched gateways it was made of cement and
its service and prices were of the Manhattan school. A little group of
Pueblo Indians, lonesomely picturesque in buck-skin and red blankets, with
silver and turquoise rings and bracelets, were always seated before its
doors, trying to sell fruit and pottery to well-tailored tourists. It had
a museum of Southwestern antiquities and curios, where a Navajo squaw
sulkily wove blankets on a handloom for the edification of the guilded
stranger from the East. On the platform in front of it, perspiring
Mexicans smashed baggage and performed the other hard labour of a modern
terminal.

Thus the Eldorado Hotel was rich in that contrast between the old and the
new which everywhere characterized the town. Generally speaking, the old
was on exhibition