But if the wild forces now loose in Mexico should overthrow all the civilized elements of life? There hides the possible moment of an effective American intervention.
I have not been surprised to read subsequently that the reason for Enriquez's resignation was despair. Four days in Chihuahua is not long enough to judge the whole of the State but any visitor might be struck by the daring faces of the Spaniards and by the almost complete savagery of the Indians. The latter, the Tarahumare, are black and nearly naked. They wear gigantic straw sombreros, and their bodies below are as it were triangled. Broad brows, sunstretched eyes, broad nose but pointed chin—their faces are triangular. Their bodies from shoulders to navel are black triangles, their loin-cloths hang in a triangle of dull rags, their thighs from the fullness of their loins to gaunt bony knees—two more triangles of dark dirt—and then wasted feet with mud-caked separate toes. A strange people these Indians, for they worship the Echino cactus and make sacrifice to it. The other citizens of this great State worship not the cactus but the revolver.
As I resumed my journey southward over hundreds more miles of desert I noted that the man next to me kept a loaded revolver on the couch beside him—ready in case of bandidos. It is a wild country—what do the foreigners go there for? Well, mostly for gold—for a fortune to be quickly won.
We had had some hope of meeting Wilfrid Ewart at Chihuahua, but he had left before we came. We found his signature in the register of the Hotel Robinson. We had gone to a little Spanish hotel in the Plaza called the San Luis. It seemed as if his ten days would be over before we reached Mexico City. After Torreon we began to watch for Laredo trains, not knowing that the railroad branches off at a much earlier point, Huehuetoca. It would have been amusing and pleasant to have shaken hands at some little station where our trains, going in different directions, were drawn up and steaming. But as it happened he had not left the capital.
In the train were several mining men, mostly Americans. One came up to me and said, "I saw you at the Hotel Sheldon and I said to my friend—'He's a mud-digger, I'll bet.'" There, however, he was mistaken, but if you are English and in Mexico it stands to reason you must be in the mining interest. The talk was of gold and opals and silver. Indians brought all manner of jewelry to the trains to sell, much of it manufactured stuff imported from Europe. They brought also lustrous pots which were more genuine, and peasant embroideries and boxes of sweetened cream and baskets of strawberries. At Irapuato on the 26th of December the whole station swarmed with vendors of strawberries. They say it always does, any time in the year.
The train emerged from the waterless sand on to the maguey plantations. The eyes rested gratefully on the green plumes of the banana palm and on the scarlet flowers of some tropical tree. The bougainvillæa bounced into a crimson effulgence of bloom. We entered at last a rich and verdant country fed by many rivers, and that was Anahuac, the fertile land of the Aztec Empire, of which the city now called Mexico but in their day Tenochtitlan is and was the capital.
CHAPTER XXIV AT MONTEZUMA'S CAPITAL
Here the event happened which saddened the year: my friend was killed. Wilfrid Ewart, to whose genius and person I was devoted, and who in turn was very fond of us, was shot on Old Year's Night, a lamentable taking off over which one can never cease to grieve.