Ever the peon glanced back over his shoulder, until, with a cry of joy, he indicated a second black-smoke pillar rising in the air beyond the first burning well.
"More," he chuckled. "There are more wells. They will all burn. And so shall they and all their race pay for the many blows they have beaten on me. And there is a lake of oil there, like the sea, like Juchitan Inlet it is so big."
And Francis recollected the lake of oil about which the haciendado had told him that, containing at least five million barrels which could not yet be piped to sea transport, lay open to the sky, merely in a natural depression in the ground and contained by an earth dam.
"How much are you worth?" he demanded of the peon with apparent irrelevance.
But the peon could not understand.
"How much are your clothes worth all you've got on?"
"Half a peso, nay, half of a half peso," the peon admitted ruefully, surveying what was left of his tattered rags.
"And other property?"
The wretched creature shrugged his shoulders in token of his utter destitution, then added bitterly:
"I possess nothing but a debt. I owe two hundred and fifty pesos. I am tied to it for life, damned with it for life like a man with a cancer. That is why I am a slave to the haciendado."