Eustace came to my rescue. Two years and eight sweethearts upon the border had given him a fluent command of the language.
“They’ve misjudged your intentions,” he chuckled, after he had calmed the mob. “I’ve explained it all. This old geezer with the four whiskers on his chin is her man, and he says he’ll let you take her picture for two pesos. I suppose he’s tired of her, and doesn’t care whether she croaks or not.”
But the squaw evidently valued her life at more than two pesos. For she gathered up her skirts once more, and fled away down the river, dragging the burro behind her.
VI
It was but a few hours’ ride from Suaqui to El Progresso Mine. It lay in the center of a ragged, bowl-shaped valley in the heart of the mountains, some ninety miles from the railroad—a group of gaping shafts beside a stone blockhouse, with a village of thatched laborers’ quarters straggling along a sandy, cactus-hedged street.
Some half dozen American bosses occupied the blockhouse. The native workmen numbered about two hundred, most of them Pimas and mestizos, or mixed-breeds.
“Don’t shoot at any rattlesnakes,” MacFarlane warned us, “or you’ll see everybody dropping work and running for headquarters to resist attack.”
The mine itself had never been threatened by the Yaquis, but on several occasions they had attempted to ambush the provision trucks. Like most of the mines in Mexico, El Progresso was not the sort where one had merely to walk out with a pick and chop large pieces of silver off a convenient mountain side; before a single speck of mineral could be extracted, it had been necessary to transport across the desert a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of machinery; every bit of it had been brought over the long trail on truck or muleback, and the journey of every train had meant the possibility of a fight with Indians.
The Yaquis of Sonora are closely related to the Apaches of our own border country. From the earliest coming of the white man, they have resented the invasion of their domain. The Spaniards were never able to conquer them. Porfirio Diaz, who pacified all the rest of Mexico, could never make the Yaquis recognize the sovereignty of the Mexican government over their territory. He sent expedition after expedition against them, depleted their ranks by constant warfare, and took thousands of prisoners whom he shipped to far-off Yucatan to labor as virtual slaves upon the henequin plantations. But the atrocities of the Diaz soldiers merely aggravated the Indians’ hatred of their would-be rulers.
From time to time, in more recent years, groups of Yaquis have made their peace with the Mexican authorities. Many of them, known as “manzos” in distinction from the “bravos” in the hills, are to be found in every Sonoran village and even in Arizona. As soldiers, they are the bravest in Mexico, and as laborers the most industrious. But they were never especially friendly to Carranza, and in his era, although some served in the federal army, they frequently did so in order to obtain arms or ammunition for their own use. Soldiers one day, they were apt to be bandits the next.