Comayagua by day was a lazy, silent place, chiefly barefoot, the few possessors of shoes being gaudily dressed young men whose homes were earth-floored huts. The place had the familiar Central American air of trying to live with the least possible exertion; its people were a mongrel breed running all the gamut from black to near-white. There were none of the fine physical specimens common to the highlands of Mexico, and the teeth were notably bad. A few of the soldiers, in blue-jean uniforms with what had once been white stripes, faded straw hats, and bare feet, were mountain Indians with well-developed chests; for military service—of the catch-them-with-a-rope variety—is compulsory in Honduras. But the population in general was anemic and stunted. Two prisoners were at work in the streets; more properly they sat smoking cigarettes and putting a finger cautiously to their lips when I passed in silent request not to wake up their guard, who was sound asleep on his back in the shade, his musket lying across his chest. The town had one policeman, a kinky-haired youth in a white cap and a pale light gray cotton uniform, who carried a black club and wore shoes! The cartero, or mailman, was a barefoot boy in faded khaki and an ancient straw hat, who wandered lazily and apparently aimlessly about town with the week's correspondence in hand, reading the postals and feeling the contents of each letter with a proprietary air. The sun was brilliant and hot here in the valley, and there was an aridity that had not been suggested in the view of it from the heights above.
It was no place to spend New Year's, however, stiff and sore though I was from the hardships of the road, and toward lazy, silent noonday I wandered on along the trail to the modern capital, hoping that it, at least, might have real beds and a hotel, and perhaps even white inhabitants. The battered old church bells were thumping as I topped the slight rise that hid the town from view, and it was four hours later that I saw or heard the next human being, or any other evidence of his existence except a stretch of barb-wire and one lone telegraph wire sagging from one crooked stick to another. The four stony dry but flat leagues along the valley floor had brought me to San Antonio, all the population of which was loafing and mildly celebrating New Year's, as they would celebrate any other possible excuse not to work. Here I obtained water, and new directions that led me off more toward the east and the heaped-up mountains that lay between me and Tegucigalpa. On all sides spread a dry, bushy land, aching for cultivation. I had the good fortune to fall in with a river so large I was able to swim three strokes in one of its pools, and strolled with dusk into the town of Flores on the edge of the first foothills of the ranges still to be surmounted.
Though still a lazy naked village, this one showed some hint of the far-off approach of civilization. Animals were forbidden the house in which I passed the night, and its tile-floor was almost clean. This latter virtue was doubly pleasing, for the rafters above were so high that even when I had tied my hammock by the very ends of the ropes I could only climb in by mounting a chair and swinging myself up as into a trapeze; and if I must break a leg it would be some slight compensation to do so on a clean floor. How much uncleanliness this simple little 30-cent net had kept me up out of since the day I bought it in Guatemala City!
Like many of the tasks of life, this one grew easier toward its termination. A moderate day's walk, not without rocky climbs and bajadas, but with considerable stretches of almost level going across solitary wind-cooled plains, brought me to Támara. A passing company of soldiers had all but gutted the village larder, but at dusk in the last hut I got not only food but meat, and permission to swing my hammock from the blackened rafters of the reed kitchen, over the open pots and pans. Incidentally, for the first time in Honduras prices were quadrupled in honor of my being a foreigner. Civilization indeed was approaching.
Half way up the wooded ridge beyond I met the sun mounting from the other side, fell in soon after with a real highway, and at eleven caught the first sight of Tegucigalpa, the "City of the Silver Hills," capital of the Sovereign and Independent Republic of Honduras. It was no very astounding sight; merely what in other lands would have been considered a large village, a chiefly one-story place with a whitewashed church, filling only a small proportion of a somewhat barren valley surrounded by high rocky and partly wooded hills. I marched down through Comayagüela in all the disreputableness of fifteen days on the trail, across the little bridge of a few arches over a shallow river which to Honduraneans far and wide is one of the greatest works of man, and into the park-like little central plaza, with its huge arbor of purple bourgainvillea.
The "Hotel Jockey Club" was not all that the imagination might have pictured, but at least there Was the satisfaction of knowing that any stranger in town, be he "gringo" or president-elect, famous or infamous, rich or honest, could stop nowhere else. Among its luxuries was a "bath," which turned out to be a massive stone vessel in the basement with a drizzle of cold water from a faucet above that was sure to run dry about the time the victim was well soaped; its frontiersman rooms were furnished with little more than weak-kneed canvas cots, and the barefoot service of the dining-room was assisted by all the dogs, fowls, and flies of the region. But there lay two hungry weeks of Central American trail behind me and for days to come I ate unquestioningly anything that came within reach of my fingers, of whatever race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Just around the corner—as everything is in this miniature capital—the American Legation delivered the accumulated mail of a month, and the pair of real shoes I had had the happy thought of sending to myself here months before. This bit of foresight saved me from hobbling on to the coast barefoot. I had arrived just in time to attend one of Tegucigalpa's gala events, the inspection of her newly reformed police force. "It is set for three," said the legation secretary, "so come around about three-thirty." Just around another corner we entered toward four the large dusty patio of a one-story building of mud blocks, against the adobe wall of which were lined up something over a hundred half-frightened, half-proud Honduranean Indians in brand new, dark-blue uniforms and caps, made in Germany, and armed with black night-sticks and large revolvers half-hidden in immense holsters. We took the places of honor reserved for us at a bench and table under the patio veranda beside the chief of police, an American soldier of fortune named Lee Christmas. He was a man nearing fifty, totally devoid of all the embroidery of life, golden toothed and graying at the temples, but still hardy and of youthful vigor, of the dress and manner of a well-paid American mechanic, who sat chewing his black cigar as complacently as if he were still at his throttle on the railroad of Guatemala. Following the latest revolution he had reorganized what, to use his own words, had been "a bunch of barefooted apes in faded-blue cotton rags" into the solemn military company that was now to suffer its first formal inspection. The native secretary, standing a bit tremulously in the edge of the shade, called from the list in his hand first the name of Christmas himself, then that of the first assistant, and his own, he himself answering "present" for each of these. Next were the commanders, clerks, under-secretaries, and the like in civilian garb, each, as his name was pronounced, marching past us hat in hand and bowing profoundly. Last came the policemen in uniform. As the secretary read his title and first name, each self-conscious Indian stepped stiffly forth from the ranks, throwing a foot, heavy with the unaccustomed shoe, high in the air and pounding the earth in the new military style taught him by a willowy young native in civilian dress who leaned haughtily on his cane watching every movement, made a sharp-cornered journey about the sun-flooded yard and bringing up more or less in front of his dreaded chief, gave a half turn, raised the right leg to the horizontal with the grace of an aged ballet dancer long since the victim of rheumatism, brought it down against the left like the closing of a heavy trapdoor, saluted with his night-stick and huskily called out his own last name, which Christmas checked off on the list before him without breaking the thread of the particular anecdote with which he chanced at that moment to be entertaining us.
"I tried to get 'em to cut out this —— —— German monkey business of throwing their feet around," confided the chief sadly, "but it's no use, for it's in the —— —— military manual."
Judged by Central American standards the force was well trained. But the poor Indians and half-breeds that made up its bulk were so overwhelmed with the solemnity of the extraordinary occasion that they were even more ox-like in their clumsiness and nearer frightened apes in demeanor than in their native jungles. The quaking fear of making a mis-step caused them to keep their eyes riveted on the lips of our compatriot, from which, instead of the words of wrath they no doubt often imagined, issued some such remark as:
"Why —— —— it, W——, one of the bums I picked up along the line one day in Guatemala told me the best —— —— yarn that—"