Now that he had won over Alfego and had gotten the influence of the _penitentes_ on his side, Ramon’s one remaining object was to defeat just such deals as this, which MacDougall already had under way. He intended to stir up feeling against the gringos, and to persuade the Mexicans not to sell. Later, such lands as he needed in order to control the right-of-way, he would gain by lending money and taking mortgages. But he did not intend to cheat any one. Such Mexicans as he had to oust from their lands, he would locate elsewhere. He was filled with a large generosity, and with a real love for these, his people. He meant to dominate this country, but his pride demanded that no one should be poor or hungry in his domain. So now he argued the matter to Guiterrez with real sincerity. “A thousand dollars? _Por Dios_, man! Don’t you know that this place is worth many thousand dollars to you?” “How can it be worth many thousand?” Guiterrez demanded. “What have I here? A few acres of chile and corn, a little hay, some range for my goats, a few cherry trees, a house.… Many thousands? No.” “You have here a home, _amigo_,” Ramon reminded him. “Do you know how long a thousand dollars would support you? A year, perhaps. Then you would have to work for other men the rest of your life. Here you are free and independent.” Guiterrez said nothing, but he had obviously received a new idea, and was impressed. Ramon never returned to the direct argument, but he missed no chance to stimulate Guiterrez’s pride in his establishment. “This is a good little house you have _amigo_,” he would observe. And Guiterrez would tell him that the house had been built by his grandfather, but that its walls were as firm as ever, and that he had been intending for several years to plaster it, but had never gotten time. Before he was out of bed, Ramon was reasonably sure that Guiterrez would never sell. The house was indeed charmingly situated on a hillside at the foot of which a little clear trout stream, called Rio Gallinas, chuckled over the bright pebbles in its bed and ran to hide in thickets of willow. Sitting on the _portal_, which ran the length of the house and consisted of a projection of the roof supported by rough pine logs, Ramon could look down the canyon to where it widened into a little valley that lost itself in the vast levels of the _mesa_. There thirsty sands swallowed the stream and not a sprig of green marred the harmony of grey and purple swimming in vivid light, reaching away to the horizon where faint blue mountains hung in drooping lines. By turning his head, Ramon could look into the heart of the mountains whence the stream issued through a narrow canyon, with steep, forested ridges on either side, and little level glades along the water, set with tall, conical blue spruce trees, pines with their warm red boles, and little clumps of aspen with gleaming white stems, and trembling leaves of mingled gold and green.