Ramon watched him a minute. He saw that the man was weak from loss of blood. There was a great patch of dried blood on the ground beside him, now beginning to flake and curl in the sun.
“I will come back in a minute, friend,” he said.
He went back to his camp, saddled his horses, putting some food in the saddle pockets. When he returned, the Mexican sat in exactly the same place with his back against a rock and his legs and arms inert. Ramon fried bacon and made coffee for him. He had to help the man put the food in his mouth and hold a cup for him to drink. Afterward, with great difficulty, he loaded the man on his saddle horse, where he sat heavily, clutching the pommel with both hands. Ramon mounted the pack horse bareback.
“Where do you live, friend?” Ramon asked.
“Tusas,” the Mexican replied, naming a little village ten miles down the canyon.
They exchanged no other words until they came within sight of the group of _adobe_ houses. Then Ramon stopped his horse and turned to the man.
“You were hunting,” he told him slowly and impressively, “and you dropped your gun and shot yourself. _Sabes?_”
“How much were you paid to kill me, friend?” Ramon then asked.
The man looked at the pommel of the saddle, and his swarthy face darkened with a heavy flush.
“One hundred dollars,” he admitted. “I needed the money to christen a child. Could I let my child go to hell? But I did not mean to kill you. Only to beat you, so you would go away. Do not ask who sent me, for the love of God.…”
“I ask nothing more, friend,” Ramon assured him. “And since you were to have a hundred dollars for making me leave the country, here is a hundred dollars for not succeeding.”
Both of them laughed. Ramon then rode on and delivered the man to his excited and grateful wife. He went back to his camp very weary and sore, but feeling that he had done an excellent stroke of work for his purpose.
After this occurrence his success among the humbler Mexicans was more marked than ever, but some of the men of property who had been subsidized by MacDougall were not so easily won over. Such a case was that of old Pedro Alcatraz who owned a little store in the town of Vallecitos, a bit of land and a few thousand sheep. Alcatraz was a tall boney old man, and was of nearly pure Navajo Indian blood, as one could tell by the queer crinkled character of his beard and moustache, which were like those of a chinaman. He was simple and direct like an Indian, too, lacking the Mexican talent for lying and artifice. In his own town he was a petty czar, like Alfego, but on a much smaller scale. By reason of being _Hermano Mayor_ of the local _penitente_ chapter, and of having most of the people in his own neighbourhood in debt to him, he had considerable power. He was advising men to sell their lands, and was lending more money on land than it was reasonable to suppose he owned. Beyond a doubt, he had been won by MacDougall’s dollars.