said. "I would do the same thing again."

Ramon studied the law of his case with exhaustive thoroughness, but the
law did not hold out much hope for his client. It was in his plea to the
jury that he made his best effort. Here again he discovered the eloquence
that he had used the summer before in Arriba County. Here he lost for a
moment his sense of aimlessness, felt again the thrill of power and the
joy of struggle. He described vividly the poor Mexican's simple faith, his
absolute devotion to it, showed that he had killed out of an
all-compelling sense of right and duty. He found a good many witnesses to
testify that Juan's father-in-law had hectored the young man a good deal,
insulted him, intruded in his home. Half of the jurors were Mexicans. For
a while the jury was hung. But it finally brought in a verdict of murder
in the first degree, which was practically inevitable. Juan accepted this
with a shrug of his shoulders and announced himself ready to hang and meet
his Methodist God. But Ramon insisted on taking an appeal. He finally got
the sentence commuted to life imprisonment. He then felt disgusted, and
wished that he had let the man hang, feeling that he would have been
better off dead than in the state penitentiary. But Juan's wife, who
really loved him, came to Ramon's office and embraced his knees and
laughed and cried and swore that she would do his washing for nothing as
long as she lived. For now she could visit her husband once a month and
take him _tortillas!_ Ramon gave her ten dollars and pushed her out the
door. He had worked hard on the case. He felt old and weary and wanted to
get drunk.

One day Ramon received an invitation to go hunting with Joe Cassi and his
friends. He accepted it, and afterward went on many trips with the Italian
saloon-owner, thereby doing further injury to his social standing.

Cassi had come to the town some twenty years before with a hand organ and
a monkey. The town was not accustomed to that form of entertainment; some
of the Mexicans threw rocks at Cassi and a dog killed his monkey. Cassi
was at that time a slender youth, handsome, ragged and full of high hopes.
When his monkey was killed he first wept with rage and then swore that he
would stay in that town and have the best of it. He now owned three
saloons and the largest business building in town. He was a lean, grave,
silent little man.

Cassi had made most of his money in the days when gambling was "open"