THE FIGHT UNDER THE 
MESQUITE | 
BY EMERY A. PEFFLEY 
ON Ramon _ Ladino 
*. | resided on the Texas 
"=| side of the Rio Grande, 
| perhaps not so much 
“<< from choice as from 
‘=| necessity, as he was 
wanted on the other side 
of that muddy stream 
for various irregularities, among which were 
horse and cattle stealing, smuggling and 
other little errors. He was of the peon class, 
but had risen considerably above his fel- 
lows; he could talk a little English, wore 
good clothes and was looked up to by the 
general run of Mexicans along the river. 
The Don was the claimant of a small 
‘piece of land in the river bottom, but his 
house was located on porcion 43, which be- 
longed to Don Pancho Yunque, of Browns- 
ville. It was on a high hill overlooking the 
valley of the Rio Grande for miles up and 
down; ona bright morning, from his door, 
Don Ramon could see the tops of the Sierra 
de Picachos Mountains near Monterey, as 
well as the Mexican pueblas of Havana and 
Los Ebanos, on the Texas side, and San 
Miguel in Mexico. 
During the summer of 1904 a railroad was 
graded up the valley from Brownsville way; 
a town-site was laid out and the Americanos 
began coming into the new country, which, 
by the way, wasa very old one. Don Ramon 
was quick to see a chance to eke out the 
scant revenue he derived from gambling, his 
chief occupation. He owned a few hundred 
head of Mexican cattle, some goats and a 
few ponies, which ranged in the river valley 
and the cactus-covered hills and plains to 
the north. And so he started butchering 
yearlings and peddling meat to the settlers; 
furthermore, he commenced selling mescal* 
on a pretty large scale. 
In a short time the worthy gentleman’s 



* A drink made in Mexico from the juice of the maguay 
plant. 
own yearlings were getting scarce on the 
range. ‘The demand for beef was still good, 
the Americanos being meat eaters who much 
preferred not to eat goat. So it was an 
easy matter for him to go back to his old 
business of “rustling.” At first he con- 
fined himself to mavericks, as there were 
several nice ones on the range near the Ojo 
de Agua, a short distance north of his ranch. 
But soon he roped a yearling bearing the 
“Crazy S,” “T,” “Two-Bar” or any other 
well-known brand as readily as one that ran 
through the prickly pear entirely free from 
any such marking. He prospered so that 
the near-by ranchmen began to have suspi- 
cions that he was either conducting an all- 
night monte game very successfully or run- 
ning stock across the river. Yet no one 
bothered to investigate; in the spring, per- 
haps, something would be done about it. 
On a bright spring morning the Don 
started on one of his semioccasional trips 
for a yearling; as usual,he saddled up his 
. tough little brown cow pony and rode off, 
leading one of his oxen by a lariat to his 
saddle horn. Oxen in that section of the 
country are worked to the large two-wheeled 
carro, or cart, the yoke being tied securely 
to the top of the head, in front of the horns, 
with rawhide, and with their heads they can 
pull an astonishingly heavy load. Don 
Ramon was feeling in fine spirits as he rode 
out past the Rancho Banquero at the edge of 
town, for would he not get mas que seis pesos 
Americano (more than six dollars American) 
for the yearling that he would bring in, tied 
to the great, strong horns of the ox he was 
leading ? 
Out toward the Ojo de Agua he rode; on 
every side stretched the vast plain, covered 
with prickly pear, mesquite trees and brush; 
ebony trees (many dead from the nine years’ 
drought in the nineties) and many other 
varieties of brush and cacti. White-headed 
hawks gazed at him from the larger trees: a 
