and eat as much as you wish and so help yourself to continue your
journey. . . . But no more of your yarns!"

And he would turn his back upon the tramp, after giving him a few
dollars.

One day he became infuriated because a peon was nailing the wire fencing
too deliberately on the posts. Everybody was robbing him! The following
day he spoke of a large sum of money that he would have to pay for
having endorsed the note of an acquaintance, completely bankrupt. "Poor
fellow! His luck is worse than mine!"

Upon finding in the road the skeleton of a recently killed sheep, he was
beside himself with indignation. It was not because of the loss of the
meat. "Hunger knows no law, and God has made meat for mankind to eat.
But they might at least have left the skin!" . . . And he would rage
against such wickedness, always repeating, "Lack of religion and good
habits!" The next time, the bandits stripped the flesh off of three
cows, leaving the skins in full view, and the ranchman said, smiling,
"That is the way I like people, honorable and doing no wrong."

His vigor as a tireless centaur had helped him powerfully in his task
of populating his lands. He was capricious, despotic and with the
same paternal instincts as his compatriots who, centuries before when
conquering the new world, had clarified its native blood. Like the
Castilian conquistadors, he had a fancy for copper-colored beauty with
oblique eyes and straight hair. When Desnoyers saw him going off on some
sudden pretext, putting his horse at full gallop toward a neighboring
ranch, he would say to himself, smilingly, "He is going in search of a
new peon who will help work his land fifteen years from now."

The personnel of the ranch often used to comment on the resemblance of
certain youths laboring here the same as the others, galloping from the
first streak of dawn over the fields, attending to the various duties
of pasturing. The overseer, Celedonio, a half-breed thirty years old,
generally detested for his hard and avaricious character, also bore a
distant resemblance to the patron.

Almost every year, some woman from a great distance, dirty and
bad-faced, presented herself at the ranch, leading by the hand a little
mongrel with eyes like live coals. She would ask to speak with the
proprietor alone, and upon being confronted with her, he usually
recalled a trip made ten or twelve years before in order to buy a herd
of cattle.

"You remember, Patron, that yo