“I always used to carry a gun. Nowadays I’m afraid to. It’s getting too dangerous. You can’t tell who’s a bandit. Some one comes riding up to you, looking like any other peon, and just as he reaches you, his blanket slides off his shoulder and you’re looking into the muzzle of a six-shooter. Like as not, too, he’s got some pal covering you from the brush. If you’re armed, they’re likely to make it a sure thing by shooting you first and robbing you afterward. So, when I hit the interior nowadays, I just take a bottle of tequila. When I meet a bandit, I show him I haven’t anything worth taking, and offer him a drink, and that ends it.”
Quoth another, a mining man from Durango:
“You see, there’s good bandits and bad bandits. Lots of ’em are chaps as can’t make a living no other way. And some’s just kids that think it’s smart, and do it because it’s so easy. Take Trinidad, down below Rosario. Just a youngster, but he’s got the police buffaloed. Rides into town in broad daylight and covers the barber with a Colt while he gets shaved. Shoots up a dance-hall now and then, but don’t do much real harm.
“Only trouble with Trini is that he likes women. He come down from the hills one day with five of his gang, going to Rosario for something or other, and on the way he seen a fifteen-year-old girl—daughter of some rancher. Says he to the father, ‘I’ll stop to-morrow and take her along home with me.’ Well, the father wasn’t thrilled at having Trini for a son-in-law, especially so informal-like, so he sent to town for protection, and got a couple of dozen soldiers. They was all asleep in the shade next afternoon, when Trini gallops up, swings the girl on his saddle—most of these country kids think it’s kind of romantic to be taken away like that—and off he goes with her. The soldiers chased him, of course, but he held them off in a mountain pass ’til dark, and got away with her.
“That’s the way things are these days. I’m still trying to run my mine up in Durango, and I’m paying taxes to Carranza for protection, but I have to pay four different bandits to leave me alone. Even then, I got to ship my ore unsmelted for a hundred miles. If I sent out pure bullion, some other bandit would probably grab it.”
Quoth a third:
“There’s worse than Trini just north of here, up in Tepic. They were capturing people so often that a prominent banker up in Mazatlán was making a regular business of ransoming them. He went down one time with five thousand pesos to buy another fellow’s liberty, and the bandits grabbed him, and held him until his friends sent down five thousand pesos more. So anybody who gets caught now is out of luck. Those fellows have a nasty habit of cutting off your finger each week, and sending it up, all nicely preserved in a bottle of alcohol so it can be recognized, with a little reminder that unless the cash comes pretty soon, they’ll send the head.”
VI
So worthless were the federal troops that many Americans whom I met during my trip professed a preference for bandits.
