Whack! It took many a thump and prod and "Bur-r-r-r-r-r-o!" to make the pretty little mouse-colored donkey he was riding keep up with me—and what did I think he paid for him? Eighteen pesos! Sí, señor, ní más ní menos. A bargain, eh? And for the other one at home, which is larger, only twenty-two pesos, and for the one they stole from him, fifteen pesos and a bag of corn. And once they stole all three of the burritos and he ran half way to Colima and had them arrested and got the animalitos back. So that now he had two oxen—pray God they were still safe—and two burros and three pieces of land and a good wife—only yesterday she fell down and broke her arm and he had had to cut sticks to tie it up and she would have to work without using it for a long time—
Whack! "Anda bur-r-r-r-r-ro!" and once he owned it he never could get himself to sell an animalito. They were sometimes useful to plow and plant anyway, and this life of sembrar and cosechar was just the one for him. The cities, bah!—though he had been twice to Guadalajara and only too glad to get away again—and wasn't I tired enough to try the burrito a while, I should find her pace smooth as sitting on the ground. No? Well, at least if I got tired I could come and spend the night in his casita, a very poor little house, to be sure, which he had built himself long ago, soon after they were married, but there I would be in my own house, and his wife—or perhaps now he himself—would ordeñar la vaca and there would be fresh milk and—
So on for some seven or eight miles. Here and there the road passed through an open gate as into a farmyard, though there were no adjoining fences to mark these boundaries of some new hacienda or estate. From the highest point there was a pretty retrospect back on Atequisa and the railroad and the broad valley almost to far-off Guadalajara, and ahead, also still far away, Lake Chapala shimmering in the early sunset. Between lay broad, rolling land, rich with flowers and shrubbery, and with much cultivation also, one vast field of ripening Indian corn surely four miles long and half as wide stretching like a sea to its surrounding hills, about its edge the leaf and branch shacks of its guardians. Maize, too, covered all the slope down to the mountain-girdled lake, and far, far away on a point of land, like Tyre out in the Mediterranean, the twin towers of the church of Chapala stood out against the dimming lake and the blue-gray range beyond.
Two leagues off it the peasant pointed out the ridge that hid his casita and his animalitos and his good wife—with her broken arm now—and regretting that I would not accept his poor hospitality, for I must be tired, he rode away down a little barranca walled by tall bushes with brilliant masses of purple, red, and pink flowers and so on up to the little patch of corn which—yes, surely, I could see a corner of it from here, and from it, if only I would come, I should see the broad blue view of Chapala lake, and—My road descended and went down into the night, plentifully scattered with loose stones. Before it had grown really dark I found myself casting a shadow ahead, and turned to find an enormous red moon gazing dreamily at me from the summit of the road behind. Then came the suburbs and enormous ox-carts loaded with everything, and donkeys without number passing silent-footed in the sand, and peons, lacking entirely the half-insolence and pulque-sodden faces of Guanajuato region, greeted me unfailingly with "Adiós" or "Buenas noches."
But once in the cobble-paved village I must pay high in the "Hotel Victor"—the larger ones being closed since anarchy had confined the wealthy to their cities—for a billowy bed and a chicken centuries old served by waiters in evening dress and trained-monkey manners. The free and easy old casa de asistencia of Guadalajara was far more to my liking. But at least the landlord loaned me a pair of trunks for a moonlight swim in Lake Chapala, whispering some secret to its sandy beaches in the silence of the silver-flooded night.
It is the largest lake in Mexico, second indeed only to Titicaca among the lofty sheets of water of the Western world. More than five thousand feet above the sea, it is shallow and stormy as Lake Erie. Waves were dashing high at the foot of the town in the morning. Its fishermen are ever fearful of its fury and go to pray for a safe return from every trip before their patron St. Peter in the twin-spired village church up toward which the lake was surging this morning as if in anger that this place of refuge should be granted its legitimate victims.
Its rage made the journey by water I had planned to Ribera Castellanos inadvisable, even had an owner of one of the little open boats of the fishermen been willing to trust himself on its treacherous bosom, and by blazing eleven I was plodding back over the road of yesterday. The orange vendors of Atequisa gathered around me at the station, marveling at the strength of my legs. In the train I shared a bench with a dignified old Mexican of the country regions, who at length lost his reserve sufficiently to tell me of the "muy amigo gringo" whose picture he still had on the wall of his house since the day twenty-seven years ago when my compatriot had stopped with him on a tour of his native State, carrying a small pack of merchandise which gave him the entrée into all houses, but which he purposely held at so high a price that none would buy.
From Ocotlán station a broad level highway, from which a glimpse is had of the sharp, double peak of Colima volcano, runs out to Ribera Castellanos. Sam Rogers was building a tourist hotel there. Its broad lawn sloped down to the edge of Lake Chapala, lapping at the shores like some smaller ocean; from its verandas spread a view of sixty miles across the Mexican Titicaca, with all vacation sports, a perennial summer without undue heat, and such sunsets as none can describe. The hacienda San Andrés, also American owned, embraced thousands of acres of rich bottom land on which already many varieties of fruit were producing marvelously, as well as several mountain peaks and a long stretch of lake front. The estate headquarters was like some modern railway office, with its staff of employees. In the nearby stables horses were saddled for us and we set off for a day's trip all within the confines of the farm, under guidance of the bulky Mexican head overseer in all his wealth of national garb and armament.
For miles away in several directions immense fields were being plowed by dozens of ox-teams, the white garments of the drivers standing out sharply against the brown landscape. Two hours' riding around the lagoon furnishing water for irrigation brought us to a village of some size, belonging to the estate. The wife of one of the bee-tenders emerged from her hut with bowls of clear rich honey and tortillas, and the manner of a serf of medieval times before her feudal lord. The bees lived in hollow logs with little thatched roofs. For several miles more the rich bottom lands continued. Then we began to ascend through bushy foothills, and cultivation dropped behind us, as did the massive head overseer, whose weight threatened to break his horse's back. Well up we came upon the "chaparral," the hacienda herdsman, tawny with sunburn even to his leather garments. He knew by name every animal under his charge, though the owners did not even know the number they possessed. A still steeper climb, during the last of which even the horses had to be abandoned, brought us to a hilltop overlooking the entire lake, with the villages on its edge, and range after range of the mountains of Jalisco and Michoacán. Our animals were more than an hour picking their way down the stony trails between all but perpendicular cornfields, the leaves of which had been stripped off to permit the huge ear at the top the more fully to ripen. A boulder set in motion at the top of a field would have been sure death to the man or horse it struck at the bottom.
The hotel launch set me across the lake next morning. From the rock-tumbled fisher-town of La Palma an arriero pointed out to me far away across the plains of Michoacán a mountain of striking resemblance to Mt. Tabor in Palestine, as the landmark on the slopes of which to seek that night's lodging. The treeless land of rich black loam was flat as a table, yet the trail took many a turn, now to avoid the dyke of a former governor and Porfirio Diaz, who planned to pump dry this end of the lake, now for some reason only those with Mexican blood in their veins could fathom. Peons were fishing in the irrigating ditches with machetes, laying their huge, sluggish victims all but cut in two on the grass behind them.