d. Then the gringos came.
Little by little these cursed _Americanos_ have taken all that I had
from me. But as they have sown so shall they reap. I have taken my
revenge, and you shall take more!" He paused to get his breath; then in
a terrible voice he cried: "Yes, I have robbed--robbed! For the last
three years, almost, your father has been a bandit!"

The son sprang to his feet.

"A bandit? You, father, a Ramerrez, a bandit?"

"Ay, a bandit, an outlaw, as you also will be when I am no more, and
rob, rob, rob, these _Americanos_. It is my command and--you--have--
sworn . . ."

The son's eyes were rivetted upon his father's face as the old man fell
back, completely exhausted, upon his couch of rawhides. With a strange
conflict of emotions, the young man remained standing in silence for
a few brief seconds that seemed like hours, while the pallor of death
crept over the face before him, leaving no doubt that, in the solemnity
of the moment his father had spoken nothing but the literal truth.
It was a hideous avowal to hear from the dying lips of one whom from
earliest childhood he had been taught to revere as the pattern of
Spanish honour and nobility. And yet the thought now uppermost in young
Ramerrez's mind was that oddly enough he had not been taken by surprise.
Never by a single word had any one of his father's followers given him
a hint of the truth. So absolute, so feudal was the old man's mastery
over his men that not a whisper of his occupation had ever reached his
son's ears. Nevertheless, he now told himself that in some curious,
instinctive way, he had _known_,--or rather, had refused to know,
putting off the hour of open avowal, shutting his eyes to the
accumulating facts that day by day had silently spoken of lawlessness
and peril. Three years, his father had just said; well, that explained
how it was that no suspicions had ever awakened until after he had
completed his education and returned home from his travels. But since
then a child must have noted that something was wrong: the grim,
sinister faces of the men, constantly on guard, as though the old
_hacienda_ were in a state of siege; the altered disposition of his
father, always given to gloomy moods, but lately doubly silent and
saturnine, full of strange savagery and smouldering fire. Yes, somewhere
in the back of his mind he had known the whole, shameful truth; had
known the purpose of those silent, stealthy excursions, and equally
silent ret