He was also aware that the loan would not be attractive to commercial banks, who are forced, in self-protection, to loan their money on liquid assets.  He must therefore turn to the savings-banks and trust companies.  But here again he faced an impasse.  Such institutions loan money for the purpose of securing interest on it; the last thing they wish to do is to be forced, in the protection of the loan, to foreclose a mortgage.  Hence, should they entertain the slightest doubt of his inability to repay the mortgage; should they be forced to consider the probability of foreclosure eventually, he knew they would not consider the loan.  Don Mike was bitterly aware of the fact that the history of his family bad been one of waste, extravagance, carelessness and inefficiency.  In order to place the ranch on a paying basis and take up John Parker’s mortgage, therefore, he would have to have a new loan of not less than half a million dollars, and at six per cent., the lowest rate of interest he could hope to obtain, his annual interest charge would be thirty thousand dollars.  Naturally he would be expected to repay the loan gradually—­say at the rate of fifty thousand dollars a year.  By running ten thousand head of cattle on the Palomar he knew he could meet his payments of interest and principal without lessening his working capital, but he could not do it by attempting to raise scrub beef cattle.  He would gradually produce a herd of pure-bred Herefords, but in the meantime he would have to buy “feeders,” grow them out on the Palomar range and sell them at a profit.  During the present high price of beef cattle, he dared not gamble on borrowed capital, else with a slump in prices he might be destroyed.  It would be a year or two, at least, before he might accept that risk; indeed, the knowledge of this condition had induced him to lease the San Gregorio for one year to the Basque sheep man, Andre Loustalot.  If, in the interim, he should succeed in saving the ranch, he knew that a rest of one year would enable the range to recover from the damage inflicted upon it by the sheep.

In his desolation there came to him presently a wave of the strong religious faith that was his sole unencumbered heritage.  Once again he was a trustful little boy.  He slid out of the great bed of his ancestors and knelt on the old rag mat beside it; he poured out an appeal for help from One who, he had been told—­who, he truly believed—­marked the sparrow’s fall.  Don Mike was far from being the orthodox person one ordinarily visualizes in a Spanish-Irish Catholic, but he was deeply religious, his religious impulse taking quite naturally a much more practical form and one most pleasing to himself and his neighbors, in that it impelled him to be brave and kind and hopeful, a gentleman in all that the word implies.  He valued far more than he did the promise of a mansion in the skies a certain tranquillity of spirit which comes of conscious virtue.