"Business! Far better for us if we had stayed in Santo Domingo! This Tropa couldn't buy one cigarro if they clubbed their money!..."
One of them began to sing that extraordinary ballad, "The Morning Song to Francisco Villa." He sang one verse, and then the next man sang a verse, and so on around, each man composing a dramatic account of the deeds of the Great Captain. For half an hour I lay there, watching them, as they squatted between their knees, serapes draped loosely from their shoulders, the firelight red on their simple, dark faces. While one man sang the others stared upon the ground, wrapt in composition.
"Here is Francisco Villa
With his chiefs and his officers,
Who come to saddle the short-horns
Of the Federal Army.
"Get ready now, colorados,
Who have been talking so loud,
For Villa and his soldiers
Will soon take off your hides!
"To-day has come your tamer,
The Father of Rooster Tamers,
To run you out of Torreon—
To the devil with your skins!
"The rich with all their money
Have already got their lashing,
As the soldiers of Urbina
Can tell, and those of Maclovio Herrera.
"Fly, fly away, little dove,
Fly over all the prairies,
And say that Villa has come
To drive them all out forever.
"Ambition will ruin itself,
And justice will be the winner,
For Villa has reached Torreon
To punish the avaricious."
"Fly away, Royal Eagle,
These laurels carry to Villa,
For he has come to conquer
Bravo and all his colonels.
"Now you sons of the Mosquito,
Your pride will come to an end.
If Villa has come to Torreon,
It is because he could do it!
"Viva Villa and his soldiers!
Viva Herrera and his gente!
You have seen, wicked people,
What a brave man can do.
"With this now I say good-bye;
By the Rose of Castile,
Here is the end of my rhyme
To the great General Villa!"
After a while I slipped away, and I doubt if they even saw me go. They sang around their fire for more than three hours.
But in our cuartel there was other entertainment. The room was full of smoke from the fire on the floor. Through it I dimly made out some thirty or forty troopers squatting or sprawled at full length—perfectly silent as Silveyra read aloud a proclamation from the Governor of Durango forever condemning the lands of the great haciendas to be divided among the poor.
He read:
"Considering: that the principal cause of discontent among the people in our State, which forced them to spring to arms in the year 1910, was the absolute lack of individual property; and that the rural classes have no means of subsistence in the present, nor any hope for the future, except to serve as peons on the haciendas of the great land owners, who have monopolized the soil of the State;
"Considering: that the principal branch of our national riches is agriculture, and that there can be no true progress in agriculture without that the majority of farmers have a personal interest in making the earth produce....
"Considering, finally: that the rural towns have been reduced to the deepest misery, because the common lands which they once owned have gone to augment the property of the nearest hacienda, especially under the Dictatorship of Diaz; with which the inhabitants of the State lost their economic, political, and social independence, then passed from the rank of citizens to that of slaves, without the Government being able to lift the moral level through education, because the hacienda where they lived is private property....
"Therefore, the Government of the State of Durango declares it a public necessity that the inhabitants of the towns and villages be the owners of agricultural lands...."