his annual interest
charge would be thirty thousand dollars. Naturally he would be
expected to repay the loan gradually--say at the rate of fifty thousand
dollars a year. By running ten thousand head of cattle on the Palomar
he knew he could meet his payments of interest and principal without
lessening his working capital, but he could not do it by attempting to
raise scrub beef cattle. He would gradually produce a herd of
pure-bred Herefords, but in the meantime he would have to buy
"feeders," grow them out on the Palomar range and sell them at a
profit. During the present high price of beef cattle, he dared not
gamble on borrowed capital, else with a slump in prices he might be
destroyed. It would be a year or two, at least, before he might accept
that risk; indeed, the knowledge of this condition had induced him to
lease the San Gregorio for one year to the Basque sheep man, Andre
Loustalot. If, in the interim, he should succeed in saving the ranch,
he knew that a rest of one year would enable the range to recover from
the damage inflicted upon it by the sheep.

In his desolation there came to him presently a wave of the strong
religious faith that was his sole unencumbered heritage. Once again he
was a trustful little boy. He slid out of the great bed of his
ancestors and knelt on the old rag mat beside it; he poured out an
appeal for help from One who, he had been told--who, he truly
believed--marked the sparrow's fall. Don Mike was far from being the
orthodox person one ordinarily visualizes in a Spanish-Irish Catholic,
but he was deeply religious, his religious impulse taking quite
naturally a much more practical form and one most pleasing to himself
and his neighbors, in that it impelled him to be brave and kind and
hopeful, a gentleman in all that the word implies. He valued far more
than he did the promise of a mansion in the skies a certain
tranquillity of spirit which comes of conscious virtue.

When he rose from his knees he had a feeling that God had not lost
track of him and that, despite a long list of debit entries, a
celestial accountant had, at some period in Don Mike's life, posted a
considerable sum to his credit in the Book of Things. "That credit may
just balance the account," he reflected, "although it is quite probable
I am still working in the red ink. Well--I've asked Him for the
privilege of overdrawing my account . . . we shall see what we shall
see."

At daylight he awakened