Port Barrios, to which one comes in a few hours, is at one end of a railroad, and surrounded by all the desecration that such an improvement on nature implies, in the form of zinc depots, piles of railroad-ties, and rusty locomotives. The town consists of a single row of native huts along the coast, terminating in a hospital. Every house is papered throughout with copies of the New York Police Gazette, which must give the Guatemallecan a lurid light on the habits and virtues of his cousins in North America. Most of our passengers left the ship here, and we met them, while she was taking on bananas, wandering about the place with blank faces, or smiling grimly at the fate which condemned them and their blue-prints and transits to a place where all nature was beautiful and only civilized man was discontented.
We lay at Barrios until late at night, wandering round the deserted decks, or watching the sharks sliding through the phosphorus and the lights burning in the huts along the shore. At midnight we weighed anchor, and in the morning steamed into Puerto Cortez, the chief port of Spanish Honduras, where the first part of our journey ended, and where we exchanged the ship’s deck for the Mexican saddle, and hardtack for tortillas.
THE EXILED LOTTERY
TWO years ago, while I was passing through Texas, I asked a young man in the smoking-car if he happened to know where I could find the United States troops, who were at that time riding somewhere along the borders of Texas and Mexico, and engaged in suppressing the so-called Garza revolution.
The young man did not show that he was either amused or surprised at the abruptness of the question, but answered me promptly, as a matter of course, and with minute detail. “You want to go to San Antonio,” he said, “and take the train to Laredo, on the Mexican boundary, and then change to the freight that leaves once a day to Corpus Christi, and get off at Pena station. Pena is only a water-tank, but you can hire a horse there and ride to the San Rosario Ranch. Captain Hardie is at Rosario with Troop G, Third Cavalry. They call him the Riding Captain, and if any one can show you all there is to see in this Garza outfit, he can.”
The locomotive whistle sounded at that moment, the train bumped itself into a full stop at a station, and the young man rose. “Good-day,” he said, smiling pleasantly; “I get off here.”
He was such an authoritative young man, and he had spoken in so explicit a manner, that I did as he had directed; and if the story that followed was not interesting, the fault was mine, and not that of my chance adviser.
A few months ago I was dining alone in Delmonico’s, when the same young man passed out through the room, and stopped on his way beside my table.