“Charlie Jim,” the Chinese cook, has a big room with a stove in it, and he and the stove are a never-ending wonder to all the folks, and the fame of both has gone across the mountains to Sonora and to the south. Charlie is an autocrat in his curious Chinese way, and by the dignity of his position as Mr. Jack’s private cook, and his unknown antecedents, he conjures the Mexicans and damns the Texans, which latter refuse to take him seriously and kill him, as they would a “proper” man. Charlie Jim, in return, entertains ideas of Texans which he secretes, except when they dine with Jack, when he may be heard to mutter, “Cake and pie no good for puncher, make him fat and lazy”; and when he crosses the patio and they fling a rope over his foot, he becomes livid, and breaks out, “Damn puncher; damn rope; rope man all same horse; damn puncher; no good that way.”
The patron has the state apartment, and no one goes there with his hat on; but the relations with his people are those of a father and children. An old gray man approaches; they touch the left arm with the right—an abbreviated hug; say “Buenos dias, patron!” “Buenos dias, Don Sabino!” and they shake hands. A California saddle stands on a rack by the desk, and the latter is littered with photographs of men in London clothes and women in French dresses, the latter singularly out of character with their surroundings. The old criada squats silently by the fireplace, her head enveloped in her blue rebozo, and deftly rolls her cigarette. She alone, and one white bull-dog, can come and go without restraint.
The administrador, which is Mr. Tom Bailey, of Texas, moves about in the discharge of his responsibilities, and they are universal; anything and everything is his work, from the negotiation for the sale of five thousand head of cattle to the “busting” of a bronco which no one else can “crawl.”
The clerk is in the store, with his pink boy’s face, a pencil behind his ear, and a big sombrero, trying to look as though he had lived in these wilds longer than at San Francisco, which he finds an impossible part. He has acquired the language and the disregard of time necessary to one who would sell a real’s worth of cotton cloth to a Mexican.
THE ADMINISTRADOR OF SAN JOSÉ DE BAVICORA
The forge in the blacksmith’s shop is going, and one puncher is cutting another puncher’s hair in the sunlight; ponies are being lugged in on the end of lariats, and thrown down, tied fast, and left in a convulsive heap, ready to be shod at the disposition of their riders.
On the roof of the house are two or three men looking and pointing to the little black specks on the plain far away, which are the cattle going into the lagunas to drink.
The second patio, or the larger one, is entered by a narrow passage, and here you find horses and saddles and punchers coming and going, saddling and unsaddling their horses, and being bucked about or dragged on a rope. In the little doorways to the rooms of the men stand women in calico dresses and blue cotton rebozos, while the dogs and pigs lie about, and little brown vaqueros are ripening in the sun. In the rooms you find pottery, stone metates for grinding the corn, a fireplace, a symbol of the Catholic Church, some serapes, some rope, and buckskin. The people sit on a mat on the floor, and make cigarettes out of native tobacco and corn-husks, or rolled tortillas; they laugh and chat in low tones, and altogether occupy the tiniest mental world, hardly larger than the patio, and not venturing beyond the little mud town of Temozachic, forty miles over the hills. Physically the men vacillate between the most intense excitement and a comatose state of idleness, where all is quiet and slothful, in contrast to the mad whirl of the roaring rodeo.
In the haciendas of old Mexico one will find the law and custom of the feudal days. All the laws of Mexico are in protection of the land-owner. The master is without restraint, and the man lives dependent on his caprice. The patron of Bavicora, for instance, leases land to a Mexican, and it is one of the arrangements that he shall drive the ranch coach to Chihuahua when it goes. All lessees of land are obliged to follow the patron to war, and, indeed, since the common enemy, the Apache, in these parts is as like to harry the little as the great, it is exactly to his interest to wage the war. Then, too, comes the responsibility of the patron to his people. He must feed them in the famine, he must arbitrate their disputes, and he must lead them at all times. If through improvidence their work-cattle die or give out, he must restock them, so that they may continue the cultivation of the land, all of which is not altogether profitable in a financial way, as we of the North may think, where all business is done on the “hold you responsible, sir,” basis.