"God does not eat," he remarked with finality. "The curas grow fat on us."
"Why do you give it?" I asked.
"It is the law," said several at once.
And not one would believe that that law was repealed in Mexico in the year 1857!
I asked them about General Urbina. "A good man, all heart." And another: "He is very brave. The bullets bound off him like rain from a sombrero...." "He is the cousin of my woman's first husband's sister." "He is bueno para los negocios del campo" (that is to say, he is a highly successful bandit and highwayman). And finally one said proudly: "A few years ago he was just a peon like us; and now he is a General and a rich man."
But I shall not soon forget the hunger-pinched body and bare feet of an old man with the face of a saint, who said slowly: "The Revolucion is good. When it is done we shall starve never, never, never, if God is served. But it is long, and we have no food to eat, or clothes to wear. For the master has gone away from the hacienda, and we have no tools or animals to do our work with, and the soldiers take all our corn and drive away the cattle...."
"Why don't the pacificos fight?"
He shrugged his shoulders. "Now they do not need us. They have no rifles for us, or horses. They are winning. And who shall feed them if we do not plant corn? No, señor. But if the Revolucion loses, then there will be no more pacificos. Then we will rise, with our knives and our horsewhips.... The Revolucion will not lose...."
As Antonio and I rolled up in our blankets on the floor of the granary, they were singing. One of the young bucks had procured a guitar somewhere, and two voices, clinging to each other in that peculiar strident Mexican "barber-shop" harmony, were whining loudly something about a "trista historia d'amor."...
The rancho was one of many belonging to the Hacienda of El Canotillo, and all next day we drove through its wide lands, which covered more than two million acres, I was told. The hacendado, a wealthy Spaniard, had fled the country two years before.