V
I was awakened at 4 a.m. by a great pounding upon my door.
Bill, a husky American truck-driver, was going up to Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, and desired company. The business-like Chinese were already on the job with breakfast. We ate it in grouchy early-morning silence, and drove off toward the mountains through an inky-black fog.
“I know every inch of the way,” consoled Bill. “There’ll be no trouble unless somebody takes a shot at us, or blows up a bridge. They haven’t started yet, but they’re likely to, any minute. Somebody cut the telegraph wires last night.”
From time to time, as we raced through the darkness, stern voices called upon us to halt. From the road ahead a group of hard-faced natives would emerge into the glare of our searchlights, covering us with rifles. They were the federal soldiers, barefoot and tattered, with nothing to distinguish them from revolutionists. They examined my passport, ransacked the cargo in search of arms or ammunition, and finally permitted us to continue.
Eventually the sun made its appearance, revealing the most broken of landscapes. The name “Honduras” means depths, and the land is well named. A forty-five degree slope was considered fairly level here. On such grades, the peasants had built their patches of cornfield. Even these patches were infrequent, for the whole tumbled country seemed to go straight up or down. The road itself scaled precipitous heights, and twisted around narrow cliffs, where the least mistake of a chauffeur might send a car tumbling over and over into infinity. It was all ruggedly beautiful, particularly as we climbed into the coolness of six thousand feet above the sea, where the hills were covered with pines, but it was a cruel country—such a country as discourages agriculture and effectually prevents the transportation that might open up its vast store of mineral wealth—a country suited only for warfare and revolution. And from the time of the conquest revolution has been its principal product.
Bill, however, who had lived here for something over a decade, loved both the country and its people.
“They’re all right, if you know how to handle ’em. Take that boy of mine up there on the cargo. Mighty good boy. I got ’im tied up with rope just now. Came in drunk and kinder ugly last night. But he’s comin’ out of it. I’ll buy him a bracer at the next stop, and he’ll be all right. Best boy on the road.”
Bill spoke always with conviction. He finished off each sentence with ejaculations suitable only to the pulpit. Then he spat.
“I wouldn’t go home for a million dollars. Can’t stand the damned sissies back there. Give me roughnecks! I ain’t got much use for them society fellows. I’ve got a brother in Minneapolis. He was a regular guy when we was kids. Could lick anybody in school. But he made a lot of money and married one of them fiddle-ly-diddle-lies, and went all to pieces. I came home to see him two years ago. He met me at the station with a big car, all dressed up in a fur overcoat, and he says, ‘Bill, you’re just in time for luncheon.’ I looked at him. I says, ‘I guess you mean lunch, don’t you?’ He took me to a regular mansion. Out came the fiddle-ly-diddle-ly. He says, ‘Mable, may I present my long-lost brother from Honduras?’ Christ! Why couldn’t he say, ‘Bill, meet the old woman’? She holds out her hand, way up in the air, like they do in the movies, and says, ‘Charmed, I’m sure.’ God!”
He gave the wheel a violent twist, and we shot around a mountain cliff. He drove along a narrow precipice with one wheel almost hanging over the rugged gulch below.
“They took me down to ‘luncheon.’ One of them big English stiffs in a boiled shirt came out and gave us each a little cup of soup and a cracker. I just looked at my brother. ‘Joe,’ I says, ‘ain’t this lime-juicer goin’ to give us nothin’ to eat?’ He says, ‘We’ll have dinner in the evening; you’ll soon get accustomed to it.’ ‘Accustomed hell!’ I says; ‘to-night I’ll be down in a restaurant, gettin’ a regular feed. I’ll be eatin’ corn-beef and cabbage, same as you used to eat. I ain’t sore at you, Joe, I’m disappointed. You was a regular guy before you got them society ideas. But you don’t make a sissy out of me. I’m goin’ straight back to Honduras.’”
He drove along the precipice with savage relish. Presently, as we passed a little native farm in a rugged valley, he called my attention to it.
“That’s where my wife comes from. No fiddle-ly-diddle-ly for me. She’s an Indian—pure-blooded Indian—but she’s white—whiter’n you are—and a damned good wife, too. We don’t take luncheon in our house. We eat lunch. Luncheon! Christ!”