"Papá 'stá dormido."
But he was misinformed, for when his mother introduced me into the parlor, father, in shirt-sleeves, was already rubbing the sleep out of his eyes and preparing to light the first after-siesta cigarette. When my impressiveness had penetrated his reawakening intellect, he prepared me a document which, reduced to succinct English, amounted to the statement that the prison and all it contained was mine for the asking.
A whiff of this sesame opened like magic the three immense iron doors through anterooms in charge of trusties, in prison garb of the material of blue overalls and caps shaped like a low fez. Inside, a "preso de confianza" serving as turnkey led the way along a great stone corridor to a little central patio with flowers and a central fountain babbling merrily. From this radiated fifteen other long-vaulted passages, seeming each fully a half mile in length; for with Latin love of the theatrical the farther ends had been painted to resemble an endless array of cells, even the numbers being continued above the false doors to minute infinity. Besides these imaginary ones there were some forty real places of confinement on each side of each corridor, three-cornered, stone rooms with a comfortable cot and noticeable cleanliness. The hundred or more convicts, wandering about or sitting in the sun of the patio, were only locked in them by night. Whenever we entered a corridor or a room, two strokes were sounded on a bell and all arose and stood at attention until we had passed. Yet the discipline was not oppressive, petty matters being disregarded. The corridor of those condemned to be shot was closed with an iron-barred gate, but the inmates obeyed with alacrity when my guide ordered them to step forth to be photographed.
One of the passageways led to the talleres or workshops, also long and vaulted and well-lighted by windows high up in the curve of the arched roof.
These showed the stone walls to be at least four feet thick, yet the floor was of earth. On it along the walls sat men weaving straw ribbons to be sewn into hats on the American sewing-machines beyond. In side rooms were blacksmith, carpenter, and tinsmith shops in which all work was done by hand, the absence of machinery suggesting to the trusty in charge that Mexico is "muy pobre" as compared with other lands. Convicts were obliged to work seven hours a day. Scattered through the building were several small patios with patches of sun, in which many prisoners were engaged in making ingenious little knickknacks which they were permitted to sell for their own benefit. The speciality of one old fellow under life sentence was a coin purse with the slightly incongruous device, "Viva la Independencia!"
There was a complete absence of vicious faces, at least faces more so than those of the great mass of peons outside. I recalled the assertions of cynical American residents that all Mexicans are criminals and that those in jail were only the ones who have had the misfortune to get caught. Certainly there was nothing in their outward appearance to distinguish the inmates from any gathering of the same class beyond prison walls. Off one corridor opened the bath patio, large, and gay with sunshine and flowers, with a large swimming pool and several smaller baths. The prisoners are required to bathe at least every Sunday. Within the penitentiary was a garden of several acres, on the walls above which guards patroled with loaded muskets and in which prisoners raised every species of fruit and vegetable known in the region. The institution indeed was fully self-supporting. The kitchen was lined with huge vats into which bushels of beans, corn, and the like were shoveled, and like the prison tailor, shoe, and barber shops, was kept in excellent order. Several short-time prisoners, among them many boys, volunteered to stand in appropriate attitudes before the heavy wall at the end of a three-cornered court where condemned men are shot at three paces in the dawn of many an early summer day. In one corridor the prison band, entirely made up of prisoners, was practising, and when I had been seated in state on a wooden bench they struck up several American favorites, ending with our national hymn, all played with the musical skill common to the Mexican Indian, even among those unable to read a note. On the whole the prison was as cheery and pleasant as fitted such an institution, except the women's ward, into which a vicious-looking girl admitted me sulkily at sight of the comandante's order. A silent, nondescript woman of forty took me in charge with all too evident ill-will and marched me around the patio on which opened the rooms of female inmates, while the fifty or more of them left off their cooking and washing for the male prisoners and stood at disgruntled attention in sullen silence. Their quarters were noticeably dirtier than those of the men. My guide took leave of me at the first of the three iron doors, having still to postpone his exit a year or more, and these again, fortunately, swung on their hinges as if by magic to let pass only one of the thousand of us within.
On the mule-car that dragged and jolted us out to the "Niagara of Mexico" were three resident Germans who strove to be "simpático" to the natives by a clumsy species of "horse play." Their asininity is worth mention only because among those laughing at their antics was a peon who had been gashed across the hand, half-severing his wrist, yet who sat on the back platform without even a rag around the wound, though with a rope tourniquet above. Two gray and decrepit policemen rode with him and half way out stopped at a stone hut to arrest the perpetrator of the deed and bring him along, wrapped in the customary red sarape and indifference.
The waterfall over a broad face of rock was pleasing but not extraordinary, and swinging on my rucksack I struck off afoot. The lightly rolling land was very fertile, with much corn, great droves of cattle, and many shallow lakes, its climate a pleasant cross between late spring and early fall. From El Castillo the path lay along the shimmering railroad, on which I outdid the train to Atequisa station.
The orange vendors lolling here under the shade of their hats gave the distance to Chapala as fifteen miles, and advised me to hire a horse or take passage in the stage. This primitive bone-shaker, dark-red in color, the body sitting on huge leather springs, was drawn by four teams of mules in tandem, and before revolution spread over the land was customarily packed to the roof and high above it with excursionists to Mexico's chief inland watering-place. Now it dashed back and forth almost empty.
I preferred my own legs. A soft road led between orange-groves—at the station were offered for sale seedless oranges compared to which those of California are pigmies—to the drowsing town of Atequisa. Through one of its crumbling stone gates the way spread at large over its sandy, sun-bathed plaza, then contracted again to a winding wide trail, rising leisurely into the foothills beyond. A farmer of sixty, homeward bound to his village of Santa Cruz on a loose-eared ass, fell in with me. He lacked entirely that incommunicative manner and half-resentful air I had so often encountered in the Mexican, and his country dialect whiled away the time as we followed the unfenced "road" around and slowly upward into hills less rugged than those about Guanajuato and thinly covered with coarse grass and small brush. Twenty-one years ago he had worked here as mozo for "gringoes," my compatriots. They had offered him a whole peso a day if he would not get married. But "he and she both wanted," so "qué quiera usté'"? They had started farming on a little piece of rocky ridge. He would point it out to me when we came nearer. By and by he had bought another piece of land for fifty pesos and then poco á poco for forty pesos some more. Then for twenty-four pesos and fifty centavos he had bought a cow, and the vaca before long gave them a fine calf and twelve cuartillos of milk a day. So that he was able to buy another heifer and then an ox and finally another ox and—