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with a memory of loss of tribal communal lands which had gone on over the course of over four centuries, it might very well seem cause for suspicion…. Only — Why,
now?
Why had suspicion of his intentions (if such it was) never manifested itself before? Or, at least, never in this form? What had suddenly upset them … for they had, he now clearly recalled, been upset
before
he arrived. The source of their mistrust of him must therefore lie in something apart from him … and, almost certainly, in something apart from
them…
.
    What could this be?
    He had no doubt that it lay, somehow, in the very matters he had desired to question them about; which he, in fact,
had
questioned them about. And since they would, and perhaps really could, tell him nothing, it thus behooved him to find out the answers himself and then
tell them
. His imagination began to soar once again, and, looking down from mental heights upon a landscape only partly imaginary, saw things it had been accustomed to see before. But now it saw clearly in detail as well as in outline things of which it had previously seen as only semi-concealed hints. He saw these so clearly and so richly that it no longer was possible for him to doubt them. In his disappointments with the modern world ruled by
guerros
and
blancos
of “purer” Spanish blood than he, in his sullen retreat from it, he had failed to appreciate that his knowledge of it could make it possible for him to use it for his own (and his friends’) ends — and thus totally to defeat it. Would this be
machismo
or not?
    Thus and therefore …
    He would not only find out the answers to the mysterious questions which must be not merely puzzling but vexing the Moxtomí — and thus gain their full friendship and confidence — he would do more than that; he would solve, somehow, (details did not concern him now) the basic Moxtomi question of all: how to regain the lost
ejido
lands, and by regaining them transform the Moxtomí from the huddled handful they now were to the prosperous people they had once been, and — with the help of Luis Lorenzo Santangel — would be once again.
    The sun on its way down seemed to turn the edges of the Valley into gold.

III
    Robert Macauley, a stocky, self-contained sort of man with shrewd blue eyes and a large blond mustache, was the connection which had brought the Clays to Los Remedios … via the
Concerning the Author
note attached to a story of Macauley’s in a little magazine they happened to come across. Jacob had liked the story well enough, more than he had any of the others, which was less praise than it merited, but it was the words “
now lives in Los Remedios, a small town in the State of Mexico
” which had hooked their attention. They had moved, freshly married, from New York City, a place which Sarah declared contained no oxygen, to the Currier and Ives community of Pickering, Pennsylvania, wherein they had learned, by and by, a number of important things, such as that: it had, and for good reason, a suicide rate higher than Sweden or Japan; two can’t live as cheaply as one; their landlady, a virago with a face like a malevolent horse — ah, well….
    “If we can’t make more money, then let’s go where the money we can make will go further,” they said. And they said, “If we’ve got to move, let’s move far away in one jump.” And they said, almost in one breath: “ ‘
Los Remedios, a small town in the State of Mexico’
— hey!” They wrote immediately to Macauley and received a fairly immediate reply containing the magic words, “My own expenses amount to about $50 a month,” and beat it the hell out of Pickering, Pa., one step ahead of litigious Mrs. Moomaw’s latest writ. The trip south, via a disintegrating station wagon whose sale to them almost seemed to have been arranged by Mrs. M., standard-gage, auto-bus, and narrow-gage r.r., so exhausted them that they couldn’t have moved any farther if Los Remedios had looked like the