who has camped in a farmer's back pasture knows of
the true spirit of wildness. It had treated him without mercy and brought
out the worst of him. And yet because he had once loved and dreamed he
could not go back to the easy but limited satisfactions of the soil and be
wholly content.

So he could not make up his mind at first to surrender, but in the next
few days one thing after another came to tempt him that way. MacDougall
made him an offer for his lands which to his surprise was a little better
than the last one. He learned afterward that the over-shrewd lawyer had
misinterpreted his trip to New York, imagining that he had gone there to
interest eastern capital in his lands.

His mother and sister were two very cogent arguments in favour of selling.
The Dona Delcasar, a simple and vain old lady, now regarded herself as a
woman of wealth, and was always after him for money. Her ambition was to
build a house in the Highlands and serve tea at four o'clock (although it
was thick chocolate she liked) and break into society. His one discussion
of the matter with her was a bitter experience.

"Holy Mary!" she exclaimed in her shrill Spanish, when he broached a plan
of retrenchment, "What a son I have! You spend thousands on yourself,
chasing women and buying automobiles, and now you want us to spend the
rest of our lives in this old house and walk to church so that you can
make it up. God, but men are selfish!"

He saw that if he tried to save money and make a fight for his lands he
would have to struggle not only with MacDougall and the weather, but with
two ignorant, ambitious and sharp-tongued women. And family pride here
fought against him. He did not want to see his women folk go shabbily in
the town. He wanted them to have their brick house and their tea parties,
and to uphold the name of Delcasar as well as they might.

One day while he was still struggling with his problem he went to look at
a ranch that was offered for sale in the valley a few miles north of town.
It was this place more than anything else which decided him. The old house
had been built by one of his ancestors almost a hundred years before, and
had then been the seat of an estate which embraced all the valley and
_mesa_ lands for miles in every direction. It had changed hands several
times and there were now but a few hundred acres. The woodwork of the
house was in bad repair, but its adobe walls, three feet thick, were firm
as ever. There we