VIII
Eustace and I occupied our enforced sojourn at Manzanillo by writing up the many stories we had gleaned from the Old-Timers, and mailing them home to newspaper editors.
If the American government still insisted most stubbornly in giving Carranza a chance to make good, the American public was waking up. Newspapers were beginning to publish accounts of Mexican outrages upon American citizens and their property. The American press was commencing to expose the Carranza régime.
So many were the stories coming up from Mexico that readers were prepared to believe anything. In fact, they were ready to believe too much. For the news contained in the message we had dispatched upon our arrival in Manzanillo—“Foster and Eustace slain by bandits”—when disseminated by the worthy Mr. Werner, traveled rapidly to the border, and brought back to Manzanillo, from a former associate of mine in Nogales, a telegram inquiring about the details of our death.
Eustace and I regarded the whole affair as a joke.
We wrote my friend a joint letter, explaining that we had merely been captured by Zamorra, and had made our escape from his camp, after having thrashed him and his fellow cut-throats with our bare fists. And when at length the railway resumed operation, and we could resume our journey to Mexico City, we rode away, blissfully ignorant of the future consequences of that absurd letter, rejoicing that Manzanillo was a horror of the past. Having attacked President Carranza consistently in all our newspaper articles, we were eager to visit his capital to learn whether he were really so bad as we had pictured him.
CHAPTER VIII
THE MEXICAN CAPITAL
I
It was another four days’ journey to Mexico City—a journey directly eastward and a trifle skyward.
Mexico is a mountainous country—so loftily mountainous that one has only to travel upward to pass in turn through every variety of climate and every type of landscape.