I saw an Indian boy who had become so expert, he could load his cart with three or four different ores and not miss the amount by more than ten pounds when weighed.
The engines never stop night nor day, except to collect the rich gold dust which collects in the flues. It is a very dangerous, suffocating job, which a white man always gets ten dollars for, and a Mexican five reals, or 67½ cents.
Two railroads pass Monterey. The Mexican Central to Tampico on the Gulf, and the Mexican National to the City; and on the latter we now leave for Saltillo and the battle-field of Buena Vista.
CHAPTER II.
SALTILLO AND THE PLATEAU.
FROM Monterey to Saltillo is sixty-seven miles as the crow flies, 5,300 feet in elevation as the barometer creeps, and fifty rise to the mile as the train runs. Up, up we go with two powerful engines to the train, and the ever-present query, “If the train should break in two, where would I land?”
This is no idle question either, and to reduce possibilities, the Pullmans follow the baggage, the first-class cars next, and the second and third-class last. This is very necessary in steep grades and sharp curves, where the heavy Pullmans with their momentum would always endeavor to strike off segments and chords across the arcs.
Up we go between mountains bare of vegetation, which enables you to see them in their naked grandeur and sublimity. You very soon conclude that the train is on the trail of the little river, and trying to track it out of the canon, and you also discover that it was impossible to have built the road over any other route than the bed of the noisy, fretful little San Juan. We pass through the canon with the little stream first on one side and then on the other, clinging to the side of the mountain by a path that hardly saves the train from destruction by the overhanging rocks, but ever upward. Indeed, railroad men say that when a car breaks loose from the yard in Saltillo, it runs all the way back to Monterey. I don’t believe it. It might come part of the way, but I think before it got half way down that grade, it would leave the track and make the rest of the journey in mid-air, and in considerable less than a mile a minute, too.
On the way up we pass the little puebla of Garcia, where a peak of the mountain has an opening through it, as though some Titanic cannon-ball had crashed its way through there, showing the sunlight on the other side. As we pass, all good Catholics take off their hats and cross themselves. Far up the peaks, tiny spirals of smoke show where the charcoal burners have found some isolated shrubs and are reducing them to merchantable form. In the cleft of the rocks are also to be seen the tuna-bearing cacti, which the half-clad Indian women are gathering for food. At last the grade is surmounted and we reach Saltillo, the capital of the State of Coahuila to which once also was attached the State of Texas.