The General was with his mother. Outside the door crouched his mistress, weeping, her three children around her. For almost an hour we waited, then Urbina suddenly burst out of the door. With scarcely a look at his family, he leaped on his great, gray charger, and spurred furiously into the street. Juan Sanchez blew a blast on his cracked bugle, and the Tropa, with the General at its head, took the Canotillo road.
In the meanwhile Patricio and I loaded three cases of dynamite and a case of bombs into the boot of the coach. I got up beside Patricio, the peons let go of the mules' heads, and the long whip curled around their bellies. Galloping, we whirled out of the village, and took the steep bank of the river at twenty miles an hour. Away on the other side, the Tropa trotted along a more direct road. The Canotillo we passed without stopping.
"Arré mulas! Putas! Hijas de la Ho——!" yelled Patricio, the whip hissing. The Camino Real was a mere track on uneven ground; every time we took a little arroyo the dynamite came down with a sickening crash. Suddenly a rope broke, and one case bounced off the coach and fell upon rocks. It was a cool morning, however, and we strapped it on again safely....
Almost every hundred yards along the road were little heaps of stones, surmounted by wooden crosses,—each one the memorial of a murder. And occasionally a tall, whitewashed cross uprose in the middle of a side-road, to protect some little desert rancho from the visits of the devil. Black shiny chaparral, the height of a mule's back, scraped the side of the coach; Spanish bayonet and the great barrel-cactus watched us like sentinels from the skyline of the desert. And always the mighty Mexican vultures circled over us, as if they knew we were going to war.
Late in the afternoon the stone wall which bounds the million acres of the Hacienda of Torreon de Cañas swung into sight on our left, marching across deserts and mountains like the Great Wall of China, for more than thirty miles; and, soon afterward, the hacienda itself. The Tropa had dismounted around the Big House. They said that General Urbina had suddenly been taken violently sick, and would probably be unable to leave his bed for a week.
The Casa Grande, a magnificent porticoed palace but one story high, covered the entire top of a desert rise. From its doorway one could see fifteen miles of yellow, rolling plain, and, beyond, the interminable ranges of bare mountains piled upon each other. Back of it lay the great corrals and stables, where the Tropa's evening fires already sent up myriad columns of yellow smoke. Below, in the hollow, more than a hundred peons' houses made a vast open square, where children and animals romped together, and the women kneeled at their eternal grinding of corn. Out on the desert a troop of vaqueros rode slowly home; and from the river, a mile away, the endless chain of black-shawled women carried water on their heads.... It is impossible to imagine how close to nature the peons live on these great haciendas. Their very houses are built of the earth upon which they stand, baked by the sun. Their food is the corn they grow; their drink the water from the dwindled river, carried painfully upon their heads; the clothes they wear are spun from the wool, and their sandals cut from the hide of a newly slaughtered steer. The animals are their constant companions, familiars of their houses. Light and darkness are their day and night. When a man and a woman fall in love they fly to each other without the formalities of a courtship,—and when they are tired of each other they simply part. Marriage is very costly (six pesos to the priest), and is considered a very swagger extra; but it is no more binding than the most casual attachment. And of course jealousy is a stabbing matter.
We dined in one of the lofty, barren salas of the Casa Grande; a room with a ceiling eighteen feet high, and walls of noble proportions, covered with cheap American wallpaper. A gigantic mahogany sideboard occupied one side of the place, but we had no knives and forks. There was a tiny fireplace, in which a fire was never lighted, yet the chill of death abode there day and night. The room next door was hung with heavy, spotted brocade, though there was no rug on the concrete floor. No pipes and no plumbing in all the house,—you went to the well or the river for water. And candles the only light! Of course the dueño had long fled the country; but the hacienda in its prime must have been as splendid and as uncomfortable as a medieval castle.
The cura or priest of the hacienda church presided at dinner. To him were brought the choicest viands, which he sometimes passed to his favorites after helping himself. We drank sotol and aguamiel, while the cura made away with a whole bottle of looted anisette. Exhilarated by this, His Reverence descanted upon the virtues of the confessional, especially where young girls were concerned. He also made us understand that he possessed certain feudal rights over new brides. "The girls, here," he said, "are very passionate...."
I noticed that the rest didn't laugh much at this, though they were outwardly respectful. After we were out of the room, José Valiente hissed, shaking so that he could hardly speak: "I know the dirty ——! And my sister...! The Revolucion will have something to say about these curas!" Two high Constitutionalist officers afterward hinted at a little-known program to drive the priests out of Mexico; and Villa's hostility to the curas is well known.
Patricio was harnessing the coach when I came out in the morning, and the Tropa were saddling up. The doctor, who was remaining with the General, strolled up to my friend, Trooper Juan Vallejo.