“But these gringos—they have gone away and left me. You saw them? _Cabrones!_ They have got my money. That is all they want. My boy, all gringos are alike. They want nothing but money. They can hear the rattle of a _peso_ as far as a _burro_ can smell a bear. They are mean, stingy! Ah, my boy! It is not now as it was in the old days. Then money counted for nothing! Then a man could throw away his last dollar and there were always friends to give him more. But now your dollars are your only true friends, and when you have lost them, you are alone indeed. Ah, my boy! The old days were the best!” The old Don bent his head over his hands and wept. Ramon looked at him with a mighty disgust and with a resentment that filled his throat and made his head hot. He had never before realized how much broken by age and drink his uncle was. Before, he had suspected and feared that Don Diego was wasting his property; now he knew it. The Don presently looked up again with tear-filled eyes, and went on talking, holding Ramon by the lapel of the coat in a heavy tremulous grip. He talked for almost an hour, his senile mind wandering aimlessly through the scenes of his long and picturesque career. He would tell tales of his loves and battles of fifty years ago—tales full of lust and greed and excitement. He would come back to his immediate troubles and curse the gringos again for a pack of miserable dollar-mongers, who knew not the meaning of friendship. And again his mind would leap back irrelevantly to some woman he had loved or some man he had killed in the spacious days where his imagination dwelt. Ramon listened eagerly, hoping to learn something definite about the Don’s dealings with MacDougall, but the old man never touched upon this. He did tell one story to which Ramon listened with interest. He told how, twenty-five years before, he and another man named Cristobal Archulera had found a silver mine in the Guadelupe Mountains, and how he had cheated the other out of his interest by filing the claim in his own name. He told this as a capital joke, laughing and thumping his knee. “Do you know where Archulera is now?” Ramon ventured to ask. “Archulera? No, No; I have not seen Archulera for twenty years. I heard that he married a very common woman, half Indian.… I don’t know what became of him.” The last of the pool players had now gone out; a Mexican boy had begun to sweep the floor; the place was about to close for the night. Ramon got his uncle to his feet with some difficulty, and led him outdoors where he looked about in vain for one of the cheap autos that served the town as taxicabs. There were only three or four of them, and none of these were in sight. The flat-wheeled street car had made its last screeching trip for the night. There was nothing for it but to take the Don by the arm and pilot him slowly homeward.