II
I breathed more freely half an hour later, when we climbed the farther bank of the river-course, and rattled on again, through ever-thickening forests of cactus, to the low adobe city of La Colorada.
John showed us a nondescript mud dwelling that passed for a hotel, and we presently sallied therefrom, with paper and pencil, fully convinced that the pleasantest method of securing copy would be that of sitting on the village hitching post and listening to the experiences of some one else.
There were half a dozen other Americans in La Colorada. It had once been the home of gold mines from which heavily-guarded mule trains carried away a hundred and eight millions of dollars in bullion, but revolutionists had destroyed the machinery during the turbulent years that led up to the Carranza régime, and the town now served only as a depot for the big motor trucks which ran through hostile Yaqui country to mines farther in the interior. The half dozen Americans were the drivers of these trucks. The eldest of them was under thirty, but most of them had knocked about the far corners of the earth since childhood, and all of them surveyed with undisguised contempt the little thirty-two-caliber automatics we carried.
LA COLORADA, ONCE THE HOME OF GOLD MINES, NOW SERVED ONLY AS A DEPOT FOR TRUCKS THAT CROSSED THE DESERT
“If you was to shoot me with one of them things, and I was ever to find it out,” said Dugan, a lad of twenty, “I’d be downright peeved about it.”
Dugan stood over six feet in height. His jaw resembled the Rock of Gibraltar, and his hair suggested Vesuvius in eruption. His favorite literature, I suspected, was the biography of Jesse James. He carried a forty-four in a soft-leather holster cut wide to facilitate a quick draw. His great ambition was to “shoot up” a saloon, and since there was no bar-room in La Colorada, he had recently compromised upon the local drug-stores, and had blazed holes through the pharmacist’s castor-oil bottles.
All of these youths had encountered the Yaquis. One showed us a dozen bullet-dents in his truck, mementos of a brush with Indians on his last trip. Another had been captured, stripped of his clothing, and chased naked back to town. But of the latest incident—the murder of White and Garcia—they could give us little information. W. E. Laughlin was supposed to have an understanding with the Yaqui chiefs whereby his property and his employees were protected.
“He pays ’em so much a year to leave him alone. He’s never had any trouble before this. A year ago one of his drivers was shot—Al Farrel—but it wasn’t Yaquis. It was a gang of Mexican soldiers. They robbed the truck and blamed it on the Indians, and went scouting all over the country pretending to chase the guys that did it. Maybe the same thing has happened again.”