The soldier was about thirty, the Irishman twenty-five, and the three others somewhere between sixteen and eighteen.
"What did you fellows come down here for?" I asked.
"Excitement!" answered the soldier and the Irishman, grinning. The three boys looked at me with eager, earnest faces, drawn with hunger and hardship.
"Loot!" they said simultaneously. I cast an eye at their dilapidated garments, at the throngs of tattered volunteers parading around the plaza, who hadn't been paid for three months, and restrained a violent impulse to shout with mirth. Soon I left them, hard, cold misfits in a passionate country, despising the cause for which they were fighting, sneering at the gaiety of the irrepressible Mexicans. And as I went away I said, "By the way; what company did you fellows belong to? What did you call yourselves?"
The red-haired youth answered, "The Foreign Legion!" he said.
I want to say right here that I saw few soldiers of fortune except one—and he was a dry-as-dust scientist studying the action of high explosives in field-guns—who would not have been tramps in their own country.
It was late night when I finally got back to the hotel. Doña Luisa went ahead to see to my room, and I stopped a moment in the bar. Two or three soldiers, evidently officers, were drinking there—one pretty far gone. He was a pock-marked man with a trace of black mustache; his eyes couldn't seem to focus. But when he saw me he began to sing a pleasant little song:
I thought it diplomatic to leave, because you can never tell what a Mexican will do when he's drunk. His temperament is much too complicated.
Doña Luisa was in my room when I got there. With a mysterious finger to her lips she shut the door and produced from beneath her skirt a last year's copy of the Saturday Evening Post, in an incredible state of dissolution. "I got it out of the safe for you," she said. "The damn thing's worth more than anything in the house. I've been offered fifteen dollars for it by Americans going out to the mines. You see we haven't had any American magazines in a year now."
CHAPTER III