XIV

OPENING THE RECORD

Fighting for leave to live and labor well,
God flung me peace and ease. 
—­“A SONG OF THE ENGLISH.”

I found Jondo in the little piazza opening into the hotel court.

“Where did you leave Krane and Bev?” he asked, as I sat down beside him.

“I didn’t leave them; they left me,” I answered.

“Oh, you young bucks are all alike.  You know just enough to be good to yourselves.  You don’t think much about anybody else,” Jondo said, with a smile.

“I think of others, Jondo, and for that reason I want you to tell me that story about Ferdinand Ramero that you promised to tell me one night back on the trail.”

Jondo gave a start.

“I’d like to forget that man, not talk about him,” he replied.

“But it is to help somebody else, not just to be good to myself, that I want to know it,” I insisted, using his own terms.  And then I told him what Eloise had told me in the San Miguel church.

“Are the Ramero’s so powerful here that they can control the Church in their scheme to get what they want?” I asked.

“It would be foolish to underestimate the strength of Ferdinand Ramero,” Jondo replied, adding, grimly, “It has been my lot to know the best of men who could make me believe all men are good, and the worst of men who make me doubt all humanity.”  He clenched his fists as if to hold himself in check, and something, neither sigh nor groan nor oath nor prayer, but like them all, burst from his lips.

“If you ever have a real cross, Gail, thank the Lord for the green prairies and the open plains, and the danger-stimulus of the old Santa Fe Trail.  They will seal up your wounds, and soften your hard, rebellious heart, and make you see things big, and despise the narrow little crooks in your path.”

One must have known Jondo, with his bluff manner and sunny smile and daring spirit, to feel the force, of these brave sad words.  I felt intuitively that I had laid bare a wound of his by my story.

“It is for Eloise, not for my curiosity, that I have come to you,” I said, gently.

“And you didn’t come too soon, boy.”  Jondo was himself in a moment.  “It is another cruel act in the old tragedy of Ramero against Clarenden and others.”

“Will the Church be bribed by the St. Vrain estate and urge this wedding?” I asked.

“The Church considers money as so much power for the Kingdom.  I have heard that the St. Vrain estate was left in Ramero’s hands with the proviso that if Eloise should marry foolishly before she was twenty-five she, would lose her property.  Do you see the trick in the game, and why Ramero can say that if he chooses he can take her heritage away from her?  But as he keeps everything in his own hands it is hard to know the truth about anything connected with money matters.”