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By J. Frank Davis
Author of “A Rule of the Service,” “Too Much Golden Fleas,” Etc.
Captain Carmichael of the Texas Rangers does his duty and a little more.
Captain James Carmichael of the Texas Rangers, home-bound after a week in Mexico City on official secret business for the governor, let his gaze rove idly through the window of his Pullman as the train paused in the late afternoon at an unimportant Mexican hill village.
He saw a dingy station, around which stood and squatted expressionless, stolid, serape-draped Indian men. Behind it two or three square, flat adobe buildings, each a mean rabbit warren whose many doors were now crowded with staring women and babies. Beyond, in a disorder that made no reckoning of streets or avenues, fifty low jacals , barely higher than dog kennels, before which Indian women tended toy cooking fires or ground corn for tortillas. On a hill, a church. Far back beyond the hill’s shoulder a glimpse of the handsome hacienda whose master was feudal lord of this narrow corner of the republic—or had been, before the revolutions.
The village children of ages from five to a dozen—a swarm of them—were not with the men whose backs rested against the station walls or the women in their doorways or about the fires, but were strung along the track for the length of the train, trotting beside the Pullmans as they slowed. One could see them if he pressed his face to the screen and looked down. One could hear them whether he looked or not. They were all softly whining, their eyes upcast to the car windows, their high-pitched voices almost a chorus in unison.
“ Centavita! Centavita! Por gracias Dios, centavita! ”
Captain Carmichael was not thinking of the things his eyes saw or his ears heard. They were not unique. At least a half dozen times since noon the train had stopped where the passengers’ eyes rested upon a dingy station, many-doored adobe rabbit warrens, jacals with women tending toy fires before them, lounging men and swarming children who trotted beside the cars and begged, in the name of God, a little penny. The Ranger had noted the name of the station on its sign and it had brought his mind back to the errand that had taken him to the Mexican capital and the report that he should make to the governor at Austin, for it was not many miles back of this hill village that the Tarbox Exploration and Mining Company had one of its greatest concessions and what the Ranger captain would have to say to the governor would of necessity contain many a mention of the Tarbox Exploration and Mining Company.