Page:Stewart Edward White--The Rose Dawn.djvu/227

Rh Loud were the praises of the land as heard in such places as the Fremont Hotel veranda. But those who knew cast back in mind to other dry years within their recollection, and they began to figure ahead apprehensively.

The barometers of this condition were the banks. The men who sat in the little varnished back offices of these modest institutions were experts in the affairs of the country. They knew the peculiar conditions that obtained in a land when even the children counted the inches of rainfall for a normal February; and they were perfectly aware of the probable sequences to any given set of circumstances. It was time to retrench. It was time to fortify for a disastrous moment when, to save the integrity of the whole, it would be necessary to support whole-heartedly some of the weaker parts. That was one of the functions of banks; and in consequence, to one who did not understand, it would have seemed that at first they were unduly harsh, and later unduly generous.

One of the first to feel the effects of this prescience on the part of the bankers was Don Vincente Cazadero. He had hung on longer than most of his kind, partly because the situation of his rancho was more favourable than ordinary, partly because he was fortunate in his friends. To the latter he was almost as deeply indebted as to the bankers. New ways touched him not at all. He lived according to the old life, which had been good enough for his fathers, and was good enough for him. Therefore he raised no hay against the days of adversity; he planted no fields of alfalfa under irrigation; he made no attempts to improve the stock of his long-horned, big-headed Mexican cattle; he maintained still the old heedless lavish manner of life. No one knew exactly how many human beings Las Flores directly supported; nor did anybody but Don Vincente's major domo, who was as hide-bound and impatient of new methods as his master, know to whom wages were paid or how much. There were, as with every Spanish family, shoals of parientes, who might be roughly described as relatives, though the term included all sorts of round-about connections. These expected, as a matter of course, to be supported by the feudal head of the house.

Don Vincente rode over to see his neighbour as soon as he had