Of course, the truth became public, as it always does.  This was a new country—­only yesterday it had been the frontier, and even yet a frontier code of personal conduct to some extent prevailed.  Nevertheless, “Young Ed” Austin’s life became a scorn and a hissing among his neighbors.  They were not unduly fastidious, these neighbors, and they knew that hot blood requires more than a generation to cool, but everything Ed did outraged them.  In trying to show their sympathy for his wife they succeeded in wounding her more deeply, and Alaire withdrew into herself.  She became almost a recluse, and fenced herself away not only from the curious, but also from those who really wished to be her friends.  In time people remarked that Ed Austin’s metamorphosis was no harder to understand than that of his wife.

It was true.  She had changed.  The alteration reached to the very bone and marrow of her being.  At first the general pity had wounded her, then it had offended, and finally angered her.  That people should notice her affliction, particularly when she strove so desperately to hide it, seemed the height of insolence.

The management of Las Palmas was almost her only relief.  Having sprung from a family of ranchers, the work came easy, and she grew to like it—­as well as she could like anything with that ever-present pain in her breast.  The property was so large that it gave ample excuse for avoiding the few visitors who came, and the range boss, Benito Gonzales, attended to most of the buying and selling.  Callers gradually became rarer; friends dropped away almost entirely.  Since Las Palmas employed no white help whatever, it became in time more Mexican than in the days of “Old Ed” Austin’s ownership.

In such wise had Alaire fashioned her life, living meanwhile under a sort of truce with her husband.

But Las Palmas had prospered to admiration, and La Feria would have prospered equally had it not been for the armed unrest of the country across the border.  No finer stock than the “Box A” was to be found anywhere.  The old lean, long-horned cattle had been interbred with white-faced Herefords, and the sleek coats of their progeny were stretched over twice the former weight of beef.  Alaire had even experimented with the Brahman strain, importing some huge, hump-backed bulls that set the neighborhood agog.  People proclaimed they were sacred oxen and whispered that they were intended for some outlandish pagan rite—­Alaire by this time had gained the reputation of being “queer”—­while experienced stockmen declared the venture a woman’s folly, affirming that buffaloes had never been crossed successfully with domestic cattle.  It was rumored that one of these imported animals cost more than a whole herd of Mexican stock, and the ranchers speculated freely as to what “Old Ed” Austin would have said of such extravagance.

It was Blaze Jones, one of the few county residents granted access to Las Palmas, who first acquainted himself with the outcome of Alaire’s experiment, and it was he who brought news of it to some visiting stock-buyers at Brownsville.