The fat brown auditor addressed señora, the peon's wife, with the highest respect, even if he insisted on doing his duty to the extent of pushing aside the skirts of the women to peer under the long wooden bench for passengers. A dispute soon arose. Fare was demanded of a ragged peon for the child of three under his arm. The peon shook his head, smiling. The auditor's voice grew louder. Still the father smiled silently. The ticket collector stepped back into the first-class car and returned with the train guard, a boyish-looking fellow in peon garb from hat to legging trousers, with a brilliant red tie, two belts of enormous cartridges about his waist, in his hand a short ugly rifle, and a harmless smile on his face. There was something fascinating about the stocky little fellow with his half-embarrassed grin. One felt that of himself he would do no man hurt, yet that a curt order would cause him to send one of those long steel-jacketed bullets through a man and into the mountain side beyond. Luckily he got no such orders. The auditor pointed out the malefactor, who lost no time in paying the child's half-fare.
This all-night trip must be done sooner or later by all who enter Mexico by way of Laredo, for the St. Louis-Mexico City Limited with its sleeping-car behind and a few scattered Americans in first-class is the only one that covers this section. Residents of Vanegas, for example, who wish to travel south must be at the station at three in the morning.
Most of the night the train toiled painfully upward. As a man scorns to set out after a hearty meal with a lunch under his arm, so in the swelter of Texas I had felt it foolish to be lugging a bundle of heavy clothing. By midnight I began to credit myself with foresight. The windows were closed, yet the land of yesterday seemed far behind indeed. I wrapped my heavy coat about me. Toward four we crossed the Tropic of Cancer into the Torrid Zone, without a jolt, and I dug out my gray sweater and regretted I had abandoned the old blue one in an empty box-car. Twice I think I drowsed four minutes with head and elbow on my bundle, but except for two or three women who jack-knifed on the long bench no one found room to lie down during the long night.
From daylight on I stood in the vestibule and watched the drab landscape hurry steadily past. No mountains were in sight now because we were on top of them. Yet no one would have suspected from the appearance of the country that we were considerably more than a mile above sea-level. The flat land looked not greatly different from that of the day before. The cactus was higher; some of the "organ" variety, many of the "Spanish bayonet" species, lance-like stalks eight to ten feet high. The rest was bare ground with scattered mesquite bushes. Had I not known the altitude I might have attributed the slight light-headedness to a sleepless night.
Certainly a hundred ragged cargadores, hotel runners, and boys eager to carry my bundle attacked me during my escape from the station of San Luis Potosi at seven, and there were easily that many carriages waiting, without a dozen to take them. The writer of Mexico's Baedeker speaks of the city as well-to-do. Either it has vastly changed in a few years or he wrote it up by absent treatment. Hardly a town of India exceeds it in picturesque poverty. Such a surging of pauperous humanity, dirt, and uncomplaining misery I had never before seen in the Western Hemisphere. Plainly the name "republic" is no cure for man's ills. The chief center was the swarming market. Picture a dense mob of several thousand men and boys, gaunt, weather-beaten, their tight trousers collections of rents and patchwork in many colors, sandals of a soft piece of leather showing a foot cracked, blackened, tough as a hoof, as incrusted with filth as a dead foot picked up on a garbage heap, the toes always squirting with mud, the feet not merely never washed but the sandal never removed until it wears off and drops of its self. Above this a collarless shirt, blouse or short jacket, ragged, patched, of many faded colors, yet still showing half the body. Then a dull, uncomplaining, take-things-as-they-come face, unwashed, never shaved—the pure Indian grows a sort of dark down on his cheeks and the point of the chin, the half-breeds a slight beard—all topped by the enormous hat, never missing, though often full of holes, black with dirt, weather-beaten beyond expression.
Then there were fully as many women and girls, even less fortunate, for they had not even sandals, but splashed along barefoot among the small cold cobblestones. Their dress seemed gleaned from a rag-heap and their heads were bare, their black hair combed or plastered flat. Children of both sexes were exact miniatures of their elders. All these wretches were here to sell. Yet what was for sale could easily have been tended by twenty persons. Instead, every man, woman, and child had his own stand, or bit of cloth or cobblestone on which to spread a few scanty, bedraggled wares. Such a mass of silly, useless, pathetic articles, toy jars, old bottles, anything that could be found in all the dump-heaps of Christendom. The covered market housed only a very small percentage of the whole. There was a constant, multicolored going and coming, with many laden asses and miserable, gaunt creatures bent nearly double under enormous loads on head or shoulders. Every radiating narrow mud-dripping street for a quarter-mile was covered in all but the slight passageway in the center with these displays. Bedraggled women sat on the cobbles with aprons spread out and on them little piles of six nuts each, sold at a centavo. There were peanuts, narrow strips of cocoanut, plantains, bananas short and fat, sickly little apples, dwarf peaches, small wild grapes, oranges green in color, potatoes often no larger than marbles, as if the possessor could not wait until they grew up before digging them; cactus leaves, the spines shaved off, cut up into tiny squares to serve as food; bundles of larger cactus spines brought in by hobbling old women or on dismal asses and sold as fuel, aguacates, known to us as "alligator pears" and tasting to the uninitiated like axle-grease; pomegranates, pecans, cheeses flat and white, every species of basket and earthen jar from two-inch size up, turnips, some cut in two for those who could not afford a whole one; onions, flat slabs of brown, muddy-looking soap, rice, every species of frijole, or bean, shelled corn for tortillas, tomatoes—tomate coloradito, though many were tiny and green as if also prematurely gathered—peppers red and green, green-corn with most of the kernels blue, lettuce, radishes, cucumbers, carrots, cabbages, melons of every size except large, string-beans, six-inch cones of the muddiest of sugar, the first rough product of the crushers wound in swamp grass and which prospective purchasers handled over and over, testing them now and then by biting off a small corner, though there was no apparent difference; sausages with links of marble size, everything in the way of meat, tossed about in the dirt, swarming with flies, handled, smelled, cut into tiny bits for purchasers; even strips of intestines, the jaw-bone of a sheep with barely the smell of meat on it; all had value to this gaunt community, nothing was too green, or old, or rotten to be offered for sale. Chickens with legs tied lay on the ground or were carried about from day to day until purchasers of such expensive luxuries appeared. There were many men with a little glass box full of squares of sweets like "fudge," selling at a half-cent each; every possible odd and end of the shops was there; old women humped over their meager wares, smoking cigarettes, offered for sale the scraps of calico left over from the cutting of a gown, six-inch triangles of no fathomable use to purchasers. There were entire blocks selling only long strips of leather for the making of sandals. Many a vendor had all the earmarks of leprosy. There were easily five thousand of them, besides another market on the other side of the town, for this poverty-stricken city of some fifty thousand inhabitants. The swarming stretched a half mile away in many a radiating street, and scores whose entire stock could not be worth fifteen cents sat all day without selling more than half of it. An old woman stopped to pick up four grains of corn and greedily tucked them away in the rags that covered her emaciated frame. Now and then a better-dressed potosino passed, making purchases, a peon, male or female, slinking along behind with a basket; for it is a horrible breach of etiquette for a ten-dollar-a-month Mexican to be publicly seen carrying anything.
One wondered why there was not general suicide in such a community of unmitigated misery. Why did they not spring upon me and snatch the purse I displayed or die in the attempt? How did they resist eating up their own wares? It seemed strange that these sunken-chested, hobbling, halt, shuffling, shivering, starved creatures should still fight on for life. Why did they not suddenly rise and sack the city? No wonder those are ripe for revolution whose condition cannot be made worse.
Policemen in sandals and dark-blue shoddy cap and cloak looked little less miserable than the peons. All about the covered market were peon restaurants, a ragged strip of canvas as roof, under it an ancient wooden table and two benches. Unwashed Indian women cooked in several open earthen bowls the favorite Mexican dishes,—frijoles (a stew of brown beans), chile con carne, rice, stews of stray scraps of meat and the leavings of the butcher-shops. These were dished up in brown glazed jars and eaten with strips of tortilla folded between the fingers, as the Arab eats with gkebis. Indeed there were many things reminiscent of the markets and streets of Damascus, more customs similar to those of the Moor than the Spaniard could have brought over, and the brown, wrinkled old women much resembled those of Palestine, though their noses were flatter and their features heavier.
Yet it was a good-natured crowd. In all my wandering in it I heard not an unpleasant word, not a jest at my expense, almost no evidence of anti-foreign feeling, which seems not indigenous to the peon, but implanted in him by those of ulterior motives. Nor did they once ask alms or attempt to push misery forward. The least charitable would be strongly tempted to succor any one of the throng individually, but here a hundred dollars in American money divided into Mexican centavos would hardly go round. Here and there were pulquerías full of besotted, shouting men—and who would not drink to drown such misery?
There was not a male of any species but had his colored blanket, red, purple, Indian-yellow, generally with two black stripes, the poorer with a strip of old carpet. These they wound about their bodies, folding them across the chest, the arms hugged together inside in such a way as to bring a corner across the mouth and nose, leaving their pipe-stem legs below, and wandered thus dismally about in the frequent spurts of cold rain. Now and then a lowest of the low passed in the cast-off remnants of "European" clothes, which were evidently considered far inferior to peon garb, however bedraggled. Bare or sandaled feet seemed impervious to cold, again like the Arab, as was also this fear of the raw air and half covering of the face that gave a Mohammedan touch, especially to the women. To me the atmosphere was no different than late October in the States. The peons evidently never shaved, though there were many miserable little barber-shops. On the farther outskirts of the hawkers were long rows of shanties, shacks made of everything under the sun, flattened tin cans, scraps of rubbish, two sticks holding up a couple of ragged bags under which huddled old women with scraps of cactus and bundles of tiny fagots.