r had shrunk to a string of shallow pools in a sandy plain, the
irrigation ditches were empty, and in Old Town the Mexicans were asking
God for rain by carrying an image of the Virgin Mary about on a litter and
firing muskets into the air.

Quickly wearied, Ramon sat down on a shaded bench in the park and tried to
think out his situation and to decide what he should do. The easy way was
to sell out, pay his debts, provide for his mother and sister and with
what was left go his own way--buy a little ranch perhaps in the mountains
or in the valley where he could live in peace and do as he pleased.
Wearied as he was by struggle and disappointment, this prospect allured
him, and yet he could not quite accept it. He felt vaguely the fact that
in selling his lands, he would be selling out to fate, he would be
surrendering to MacDougall, to the gringos, he would be renouncing all his
high hopes and dreams. His mountain lands, with their steadily increasing
value, the power they gave him, would make of his life a thing of
possibilities--an adventure. Settled on a little ranch somewhere, his whole
story would be told in one of its years.

This he did not reason clearly, but the emotional struggle within him was
therefore all the stronger. It was his old struggle in another guise--the
struggle between the primitive being in him and the civilized, between
earth and the world of men. Each of them in turn filled his mind with
images and emotions, and he was impotent to judge between them.

His being was fairly rooted in the soil, and the animal happiness it
offered--the free play of instinct, the sweetness of being physically and
emotionally at peace with environment--was the only happiness he had ever
known. Vaguely yet surely he had felt the world of men and works, the
artificial world, to contain something larger and more beautiful than
this. Julia Roth had been to him a stimulating symbol of this higher, this
more desirable thing. His love for her had been the soil in which his
aspirations had grown. That love had turned to bitterness and lust, and
his aspirations had led him among greeds and fears and struggles that
differed from those of the wild things only in that they were covert and
devious, lacking the free beauty of instinct fearlessly followed and the
dignity of open battle. Of civilization he had encountered only the raw
and ugly edge, which is uglier than savagery. He knew no more of the true
spirit of it than a man