“Quirk, that was the only dirty act I was ever guilty of.  I never want to meet the people the trick was practiced on.  Leaving Las Palomas was as much my privilege as going there was.  But I was unfortunate enough to incur a few debts while living there that nothing but personal revenge could ever repay.  Had it been any other man than Lance Lovelace, he or I would have died the morning Captain Byler’s horse herd started from the Nueces River.  But he was an old man, and my hand was held and my tongue was silent.  You know the tricks of a certain girl who, with her foot on my neck, stretched forth a welcoming hand to a rival.  Tom, I have lived to pay her my last obligation in a revenge so sweet that if I die an outcast on the roadside, all accounts are square.”

CHAPTER XXI

INTERLOCUTORY PROCEEDINGS

A big summer’s work lay before us.  When Uncle Lance realized the permanent loss of three men from the working force of Las Palomas, he rallied to the situation.  The ranch would have to run a double outfit the greater portion of the summer, and men would have to be secured to fill our ranks.  White men who were willing to isolate themselves on a frontier ranch were scarce; but the natives, when properly treated, were serviceable and, where bred to the occupation and inclined to domesticity, made ideal vaqueros.  My injured foot improved slowly, and as soon as I was able to ride, it fell to me to secure the extra help needed.  The desertion of Quayle and Cotton had shaken my employer’s confidence to a noticeable degree, and in giving me my orders to secure vaqueros, he said:—­

“Tom, you take a good horse and go down the Tarancalous and engage five vaqueros.  Satisfy yourself that the men are fit for the work, and hire every one by the year.  If any of them are in debt, a hundred dollars is my limit of advance money to free them.  And hire no man who has not a family, for I’m losing confidence every minute in single ones, especially if they are white.  We have a few empty jacals, and the more children that I see running naked about the ranch, the better it suits me.  I’ll never get my money back in building that Cotton cottage until I see a mother, even though she is a Mexican, standing in the door with a baby in her arms.  The older I get, the more I see my mistake in depending on the white element.”

I was gone some three days in securing the needed help.  It was a delicate errand, for no ranchero liked to see people leave his lands, and it was only where I found men unemployed that I applied for and secured them.  We sent wagons from Las Palomas after their few effects, and had all the families contentedly housed, either about headquarters or at the outlying ranchitas, before the first contingent of beeves was gathered.  But the attempt to induce any of the new families to occupy the stone cottage proved futile, as they were superstitious.  There was a belief among the natives, which no persuasion could remove, regarding houses that were built for others and never occupied.  The new building was tendered to Tio Tiburcio and his wife, instead of their own palisaded jacal, but it remained tenantless—­an eyesore to its builder.