III
Since he put it that way, we sought out MacFarlane.
He was a tall, lean-faced man—one of the quiet, self-possessed, determined-looking mine superintendents usually encountered in Mexico. He was about to make a week’s trip to El Progresso mine, sixty miles farther in the interior. He would be glad to take us along.
And at dawn the following day, we rode out of La Colorada in one of MacFarlane’s trucks. We sat upon a miscellaneous assortment of machinery, provisions, and blasting powder, with a crew of twenty hired gunmen, each of whom wore several hundred yards of cartridge belt draped around his waist and criss-crossed over his shoulders in the approved Mexican style.
The desert seemed a trifle more forbidding than the one we had crossed the day before. When we were in the open our gunmen laughed and chatted together; when we approached the forests of yucca and mesquite, I noticed that they grew silent and watchful. But no sound came from the vast expanse of wasteland except the peaceful song of the locusts.
At rare intervals we passed a native village—a cluster of mud hovels surrounding an aged white church—and our advent created a sensation. A host of mongrel dogs but slightly removed from the coyote stage hailed us with furious yelps. Children raced barefoot beside the trucks to get a better view of us. Half-naked Indian women, pounding clothes upon the flat rocks beside a shallow brook, ceased their work to stare at us. Even the adult male population, reclining against the shady side of the adobe dwellings, sat up to look at us.
INDIAN WOMEN, POUNDING CLOTHES UPON THE ROCKS BESIDE A SHALLOW BROOK, CEASED THEIR WORK TO STARE
There was something in these tiny hamlets that recalled pictures of the Holy Land. Civilization had changed but little here since the days of the Aztecs, and despite the excitement caused by our passage, there was an air of sleepiness about the whole place which suggested another continent, a million miles farther from Broadway. So perfect was the scene that I resented the sight of a Standard Oil tin used as a water-jar, and felt distinctly offended when I heard the click of a Singer sewing machine issuing from a tiny, cactus-roofed hut.
The natives here showed little Spanish ancestry. Their features were purely Indian. A few, by their prominent cheek-bones and dark complexion, suggested a trace of Yaqui blood, but most of them were of other tribes, and all carried arms as a precaution against Yaqui raids. Every one wore a large knife, and in an open-air barber shop one native with a six-shooter on his belt was shaving another who held a rifle across his knees. All of them greeted us with the cry:
“Have you met any Yaquis?”
The day passed without incident, however, and nightfall brought us to our first stopping-place, the village of Matape, another cluster of mud hovels surrounding an ancient white church.
A buxom Indian woman, who operated a hotel on those rare occasions when visitors came to town, served us frijoles and tortillas—beans and cornmeal pancakes—and produced from its hiding place a bottle of fiery mescal. Later, when we had consumed the meal by the light of a flickering oil lamp, her daughter joined us with a guitar, and while MacFarlane watched his gunmen to see that no one kept the bottle too long inverted over his black moustachios, the girl sang to us. Still later, after she herself had sampled the potent Mexican liquor, she danced. She was rather comely, in a stolid Indian way, but she was much too heavy and graceless for complete success as a danseuse, even after two swigs of such inspiring stuff as mescal. The gunmen, however, found it highly diverting. They pushed back their chairs to clear a stage for her, and watched her with the pleased expression which a Mexican always wears when looking at a woman. The guitar twanged a weird, savage melody; the dim light from the swinging lantern shone upon a sea of dark faces, and reflected from a score of gleaming eyes; in the center of the crowded room the girl danced awkwardly, her bare feet pounding monotonously upon the mud floor.
As she finally sank, flushed and panting, upon a bench, her mother favored us with a toothless grin:
“For one hundred dollars gold I sell her!”
Eustace shook his head.
“She’s scarcely an essential part of a newspaper correspondent’s equipment.”
“Seventy-five!” persisted the woman.
“That’s a special rate,” exclaimed MacFarlane. “She lacks one ear. They say her last husband bit it off before chasing her home with a club. Of course, you can’t believe everything you hear. But you’d better turn in. To-morrow we travel on muleback.”