One of the party who had been incidentally concerned in the disagreement travelled with us. He knew both New and Old Mexico well, and among other things which he told me I remember that he said that he had seen peccaries in New Mexico, on the borders of Arizona. I had thought till then that this very disagreeable member of the pig family confined itself to more southern regions.
Treed by pigs is not exactly the position in which we should expect to find a Colonial Secretary—at least, not often. But when one of the Secretaries in Honduras was recently exploring the interior of the country, he was overtaken by a drove of peccaries, and had only time to take a snap shot at the first of them and scramble up a tree, dropping his rifle in the performance, before the whole pack were round his perch, gnashing their teeth at him, grunting, and sharpening their tusks against his tree. Now the peccary is not only ferocious but patient, and rather than let a meal escape it, it will wait about for days, so that the Secretary had only two courses—either to remain where he was till he dropped down among the swine from sheer exhaustion and hunger, or else to commit suicide at once by coming down to be killed there and then. While he was in this dilemma, however, what should come along—and looking out for supper too—but a jaguar. Never was beast of prey so opportune! For the jaguar has a particular fondness for wild pork, and the peccaries know it, for no sooner did they see the great ruddy head thrust out through the bushes than they bolted helter-skelter, forgetting, in their anxiety to save their own bacon, the meal they were themselves leaving up the tree. The jaguar was off after the swine with admirable promptitude, and the Secretary, finding the coast clear, came down—reflecting, as he walked towards the camp, upon the admirable arrangements of Nature, who, having made peccaries to eat Colonial Secretaries, provided also jaguars to eat the peccaries.
And so to sleep, and sleeping, over the boundary into Texas.
CHAPTER XXVII.
American neglect of natural history—Prairie-dogs again; their courtesy and colouring—Their indifference to science—A hard crowd—Chuckers out—Makeshift Colorado.
"HAVE we struck another city?" I asked on awaking, and finding the train at a standstill.
"No, sir," said the conductor, "only a water-tank."
"You see," I explained, "there are so many 'cities' on the Railway Companies' maps that one hardly dares to turn one's head from the window, lest one should let slip a few—so I thought it best to ask."
No, it didn't look like a country of many cities. It was Texas. And the grazing land stretched on either side of us to the horizon, without even a cow to break the dead level of the surface. It was patched, however, with wildflowers. Yellow verbena and purple grew in acres together. And then the breakfasting station suddenly overtook us. It was called Coya, and we ate refuse. When we complained, the man and his wife—knock-kneed folk—deplored almost with tears their distance from any food supply, and vowed they had done their best. And while they vowed, we starved on damaged tomatoes; and on paying the man I gave him advice to go and buy some potter's field with the proceeds, and to act accordingly.
What I hate about being starved is, that you can't smoke afterwards. The best part of a good meal is the pipe afterwards, and the more ample the meal the better the subsequent weed. But on a pint of bad tomatoes no man can smoke with comfort to his stomach. But I ate bananas till I thought I had qualified for tobacco, and with my pipe came more kindly thoughts. Outside the cars the country was doing all it could to soothe me, for the meadows were fairly ablaze with flowers. They were in distracting profusion and of beautiful kinds. I knew most of them as garden and hothouse flowers in England, but not their names; the verbenas, however, were unmistakable, and so was the "painted daisy." It suffices, however, that the country seemed a wild garden as far as the eye could reach, yellow and orange being as usual the prevailing colours.