desire but do not dare. He had taken what he
wanted. He had tasted many emotions and known the most poignant delights.
And now that he was old and his blood was slow, he stood in the way of
others who desired as greatly and were as avid of life as ever he had
been. Ramon felt a great bitterness that clutched at his throat and half
blinded his eyes. He too loved and desired. And how much more greatly he
desired than ever had this old man by his side, with his wealth and his
easy satisfactions! The old Don apparently had never been thwarted, and
therefore he did not know how keen and punishing a blade desire may be!

Tense between the two was the enmity that ever sunders age and youth--age
seeking to keep its sovereignty of life by inculcating blind respect and
reverence, and youth rebellious, demanding its own with the passion of hot
blood and untried flesh.

Between Old Town and New Town flowed an irrigating ditch, which the
connecting street crossed by means of an old wooden bridge. The ditch was
this night full of swift water, which tore at the button willows on the
bank and gurgled against the bridge timbers. As they crossed it the idea
came into Ramon's head that if a man were pushed into the brown water he
would be swiftly carried under the bridge and drowned.

CHAPTER XI

The following Saturday evening Ramon was again riding across the _mesa_,
clad in his dirty hunting clothes, with his shotgun hung in the cinches of
his saddle. At the start he had been undecided where he was going.
Tormented by desire and bitter over the poverty which stood between him
and fulfilment, he had flung the saddle on his mare and ridden away,
feeling none of the old interest in the mountains, but impelled by a great
need to escape the town with all its cruel spurs and resistances.

Already the rhythm of his pony's lope and the steady beat of the breeze in
his face had calmed and refreshed him. The bitter, exhausting thoughts
that had been plucking at his mind gave way to the idle procession of
sensations, as they tend always to do when a man escapes the artificial
existence of towns into the natural, animal one of the outdoors. He began
to respond to the deep appeal which the road, the sense of going
somewhere, always had for him. For he came of a race of wanderers. His
forbears had been restless men to cross an ocean and most of a continent
in search of homes. He was bred to a life of wande