The men obeyed with dog-like alacrity, though three of them showed some inner emotion, whether of guilt, fear, or shame, it was hard to guess. Two had been carefully gone over without the discovery of anything incriminating, when the jefe suddenly snatched up the hat of the first and found in it a knotted handkerchief containing a scrap of pure metal some two inches long. From then on his luck increased. The fourth man had been fidgeting about, half disrobing before the order came, when all at once the local authority turned and picked up a piece of ore as large as a silver dollar, wrapped in paper, which the fellow had surreptitiously tossed away among a bunch of mats against the wall. The jefe cuffed him soundly and ordered him to take off his shoes—he was the only one of the five sporting that luxury—and discovered in the toe of one of them a still larger booty. The last of the group was a cheery little fellow barely four feet high, likable in spite of his ingrained lifetime lack of soap. He showed no funk, and when ordered to undress turned to the "gringo" manager with: "Me too, jefe?" Then he quickly stripped, proving himself not only honest but the biggest little giant imaginable. He had a chest like a wine-barrel and legs that resembled steel poles, weighed fifty-two kilos, yet according to the manager, of whom he was one of the trusties, frequently carried four-hundred-pound burdens up the long hill below the mine. The jefe found something tied up in his old red cloth belt, but little Barrel-chest never lost his smile, and the suspicious lump proved to be a much-folded old chromo print of some saint.
"What's he got that for?" asked the manager.
"To save him from the devil," sneered the jefe, wadding it up and tossing it back at him.
When he was dressed again the little giant was sent to town for policemen, a sign of confidence which seemed greatly to please him. For a half hour we smoked and joked and discussed, like so many cattle in the shambles, the three prisoners, two found guilty and the third suspected, who stood silent and motionless against the wall. Three policemen in shoddy uniforms, armed with clubs and enormous revolvers sticking out through their short coat-tails, at length appeared, of the same class and seeming little less frightened than the prisoners. They were ordered to tie ropes about the waists of the criminals and stood clutching these and the tails of the red sarapes, when the jefe interrupted some anecdote to shout the Spanish version of:
"What in —— are you waiting for?"
They dodged as if he had thrown a brick, and hurried their prisoners away to the cold, flea-ridden, stone calaboose of the town, where in all probability they lay several months before their case was even called up; while the manager and I ascended to his veranda and flower-grown residence and sat down to a several course dinner served by a squad of solemn servants. As in many another land, it pays to be a white man in Mexico.
Stealing is rarely a virtue. But it was not hard to put oneself in the place of these wretches and catch their point of view that made such thievery justifiable. As they saw it, these foreigners had made them go down into their own earth and dig out its treasures, paid them little for their labors, and searched them whenever they left that they should not keep even a little bit of it for themselves. Now they had made their own people shut them up because they had picked up a few dollars' worth of scraps left over from the great burro-loads of which, to their notion, the hated "gringoes" were robbing them. Like the workingmen of England, they were only "getting some of their own back." They were no doubt more "aficionados al pulque" and gambling than to their families, but so to some extent were the "gringoes" also, and they were by no means the only human beings who would succumb to the same temptation under the same circumstances.
The ancient "Peregrina" mine was different from "Pingüico." Here we entered by a level opening and walked down most of the two thousand feet, much of it by narrow, slimy, slippery, stone steps, in some places entirely worn away by the bare feet of the many generations of peons that as slaves to the Spaniards of colonial days used to carry the ore up on their backs from the very bottom of the mine. "Peregrina" mountain was almost another Mammoth Cave, so enormous are the caverns that have been "stoped out" of it in the past four centuries. In many a place we could see even with several candles only the ground underfoot and perhaps a bit of the nearest sidewall; the rest was a dank, noiseless, blank space, seeming square miles in extent. For three hours we wandered up and down and in and out of huge unseen caves, now and then crawling up or down three or four hundred foot "stopes" on hands and knees, by ladders, stone steps, or toe-holes in the rock. Through it all it was raining much of the time in torrents—in the mine, that is, for outside the sun was shining brightly—with mud underfoot and streams of water running along much of the way; and, unlike the sweltering interior of "Pingüico," there was a dank dungeon chill that reached the marrow of the bones. Even in the shafts which we descended in buckets, cold water poured down upon us, and, far from being naked, the miners wore all the clothing they possessed. Here the terror of the peons was an old American mine-boss rated "loco" among them, who went constantly armed with an immense and ancient revolver, always loaded and reputed of "hair trigger," which he drew and whistled in the barrel whenever he wished to call a workman. A blaze crackling in the fireplace was pleasant during the evening in the manager's house, for "Peregrina" lies even higher above the sea than "Pingüico"; but even here by night or day the peons, and especially the women, went barefoot and in thinnest garb.
A native horse, none of which seem noted for their speed, carried me out to the famous old mining town of La Luz, where the Spaniards first began digging in this region. The animal made little headway forward, but fully replaced this by the distance covered up and down. To it a trot was evidently an endeavor to see how many times and how high it could jump into the air from the same spot. The ancient Aztecs, seeing us advancing upon them, would never have made the mistake of fancying man and horse parts of the same animal. Moreover, the pesky beast had an incurable predilection for treading, like a small boy "showing off," the extreme edge of pathways at times not six inches from a sheer fall of from five hundred to a thousand feet down rock-faced precipices.
Still it was a pleasant three-hour ride in the brilliant sunshine, winding round and over the hills along pitching and tossing trails. Peons obsequiously lifted their hats when I passed, which they do not to a man afoot; a solemn stillness of rough-and-tumble mountains and valleys, with deep-shadowed little gorges scolloped out of the otherwise sun-flooded landscape, broad hedges of cactus and pitching paths, down which the animal picked its way with ease and assurance, alternated with mighty climbs over a dozen rises, each of which I fancied the last.