Insurgent Mexico

INSURGENT
MEXICO

BY

JOHN REED

NEW YORK AND LONDON
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1914

COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY

EPISODES IN THIS BOOK ARE ALSO PROTECTED BY THE
FOLLOWING COPYRIGHT:
COPYRIGHT, 1914, BY THE METROPOLITAN MAGAZINE COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

To
PROFESSOR CHARLES TOWNSEND COPELAND
of
HARVARD UNIVERSITY

Dear Copey:

I remember you thought it strange that my first trip abroad didn't make me want to write about what I saw there. But since then I have visited a country which stimulated me to express it in words. And as I wrote these impressions of Mexico I couldn't help but think that I never would have seen what I did see had it not been for your teaching me.

I can only add my word to what so many who are writing already have told you: That to listen to you is to learn how to see the hidden beauty of the visible world; that to be your friend is to try to be intellectually honest.

So I dedicate this book to you with the understanding that you shall take as your own the parts that please you, and forgive me the rest.

As ever,

Jack.

New York,

July 3, 1914.

CONTENTS

[On the Border]

PART I. DESERT WAR

1. [Urbina's Country]
2. [The Lion of Durango at Home]
3. [The General Goes to War]
4. [La Tropa on the March]
5. [White Nights at Zarca]
6. ["Quien Vive?"]
7. [An Outpost of the Revolution]
8. [The Five Musketeers]
9. [The Last Night]
10. [The Coming of the Colorados]
11. [Meester's Flight]
12. [Elizabetta]

PART II. FRANCISCO VILLA

1. [Villa Accepts a Medal]
2. [The Rise of a Bandit]
3. [A Peon in Politics]
4. [The Human Side]
5. [The Funeral of Abram Gonzales]
6. [Villa and Carranza]
7. [The Rules of War]
8. [The Dream of Pancho Villa]

PART III. JIMINEZ AND POINTS WEST

1. [Doña Luisa's Hotel]
2. [Duello a la Frigada]
3. [Saved by a Wrist-Watch]
4. [Symbols of Mexico]

PART IV. A PEOPLE IN ARMS

1. ["On to Torreon!"]
2. [The Army at Yermo]
3. [First Blood]
4. [On the Cannon Car]
5. [At the Gates of Gomez]
6. [The Compañeros Reappear]
7. [The Bloody Dawn]
8. [The Artillery Comes Up]
9. [Battle]
10. [Between Attacks]
11. [An Outpost in Action]
12. [Contreras' Men Assault]
13. [A Night Attack]
14. [The Fall of Gomez Palacio]

PART V. CARRANZA—AN IMPRESSION

[Carranza—An Impression]

PART VI. MEXICAN NIGHTS

1. [El Cosmopolita]
2. [Happy Valley]
3. [Los Pastores]

INSURGENT MEXICO

ON THE BORDER

Mercado's Federal army, after its dramatic and terrible retreat four hundred miles across the desert when Chihuahua was abandoned, lay three months at Ojinaga on the Rio Grande.

At Presidio, on the American side of the river, one could climb to the flat mud roof of the Post Office and look across the mile or so of low scrub growing in the sand to the shallow, yellow stream; and beyond to the low mesa, where the town was, sticking sharply up out of a scorched desert, ringed round with bare, savage mountains.

One could see the square, gray adobe houses of Ojinaga, with here and there the Oriental cupola of an old Spanish church. It was a desolate land, without trees. You expected minarets. By day, Federal soldiers in shabby white uniforms swarmed about the place desultorily digging trenches, for Villa and his victorious Constitutionalists were rumored to be on the way. You got sudden glints, where the sun flashed on field guns; strange, thick clouds of smoke rose straight in the still air.

Toward evening, when the sun went down with the flare of a blast furnace, patrols of cavalry rode sharply across the skyline to the night outposts. And after dark, mysterious fires burned in the town.

There were thirty-five hundred men in Ojinaga. This was all that remained of Mercado's army of ten thousand and the five thousand which Pascual Orozco had marched north from Mexico City to reinforce him. Of this thirty-five hundred, forty-five were majors, twenty-one colonels, and eleven generals.

I wanted to interview General Mercado; but one of the newspapers had printed something displeasing to General Salazar, and he had forbidden the reporters the town. I sent a polite request to General Mercado. The note was intercepted by General Orozco, who sent back the following reply:

ESTEEMED AND HONORED SIR: If you set foot inside of Ojinaga, I will stand you sideways against a wall, and with my own hand take great pleasure in shooting furrows in your back.

But after all I waded the river one day and went up into the town. Luckily, I did not meet General Orozco. No one seemed to object to my entrance. All the sentries I saw were taking a siesta on the shady side of adobe walls. But almost immediately I encountered a courteous officer named Hernandez, to whom I explained that I wished to see General Mercado.

Without inquiring as to my identity, he scowled, folded his arms, and burst out:

"I am General Orozco's chief of staff, and I will not take you to see General Mercado!"

I said nothing. In a few minutes he explained:

"General Orozco hates General Mercado! He does not deign to go to General Mercado's cuartel, and General Mercado does not dare to come to General Orozco's cuartel! He is a coward. He ran away from Tierra Blanca, and then he ran away from Chihuahua!"

"What other Generals don't you like?" I asked.

He caught himself and slanted an angry look at me, and then grinned:

"Quien sabe....?"

I saw General Mercado, a fat, pathetic, worried, undecided little man, who blubbered and blustered a long tale about how the United States army had come across the river and helped Villa to win the battle of Tierra Blanca.

The white, dusty streets of the town, piled high with filth and fodder, the ancient windowless church with its three enormous Spanish bells hanging on a rack outside and a cloud of blue incense crawling out of the black doorway, where the women camp followers of the army prayed for victory day and night, lay in hot, breathless sun. Five times had Ojinaga been lost and taken. Hardly a house that had a roof, and all the walls gaped with cannon-shot. In these bare, gutted rooms lived the soldiers, their women, their horses, their chickens and pigs, raided from the surrounding country. Guns were stacked in the corners, saddles piled in the dust. The soldiers were in rags; scarcely one possessed a complete uniform. They squatted around little fires in their doorways, boiling corn-husks and dried meat. They were almost starving.

Along the main street passed an unbroken procession of sick, exhausted, starving people, driven from the interior by fear of the approaching rebels, a journey of eight days over the most terrible desert in the world. They were stopped by a hundred soldiers along the street, and robbed of every possession that took the Federals' fancy. Then they passed on to the river, and on the American side they had to run the gantlet of the United States customs and immigration officials and the Army Border Patrol, who searched them for arms.

Hundreds of refugees poured across the river, some on horseback driving cattle before them, some in wagons, and others on foot. The inspectors were not very gentle.

"Come down off that wagon!" one would shout to a Mexican woman with a bundle in her arm.

"But, señor, for what reason?..." she would begin.

"Come down there or I'll pull you down!" he would yell.

They made an unnecessarily careful and brutal search of the men and of the women, too.

As I stood there, a woman waded across the ford, her skirts lifted unconcernedly to her thighs. She wore a voluminous shawl, which was humped up in front as if she were carrying something in it.

"Hi, there!" shouted a customs man. "What have you got under your shawl?"

She slowly opened the front of her dress, and answered placidly:

"I don't know, señor. It may be a girl, or it may be a boy."

These were metropolitan days for Presidio, a straggling and indescribably desolate village of about fifteen adobe houses, scattered without much plan in the deep sand and cotton-wood scrub along the river bottom. Old Kleinmann, the German store-keeper, made a fortune a day outfitting refugees and supplying the Federal army across the river with provisions. He had three beautiful adolescent daughters whom he kept locked up in the attic of the store, because a flock of amorous Mexicans and ardent cow-punchers prowled around like dogs, drawn from many miles away by the fame of these damsels. Half the time he spent working furiously in the store, stripped to the waist; and the remainder, rushing around with a large gun strapped to his waist, warning off the suitors.

At all times of the day and night, throngs of unarmed Federal soldiers from across the river swarmed in the store and the pool hall. Among them circulated dark, ominous persons with an important air, secret agents of the Rebels and the Federals. Around in the brush camped hundreds of destitute refugees, and you could not walk around a corner at night without stumbling over a plot or a counterplot. There were Texas rangers, and United States troopers, and agents of American corporations trying to get secret instructions to their employees in the interior.

One MacKenzie stamped about the Post Office in a high dudgeon. It appeared that he had important letters for the American Smelting and Refining Company mines in Santa Eulalia.

"Old Mercado insists on opening and reading all letters that pass through his lines," he shouted indignantly.

"But," I said, "he will let them pass, won't he?"

"Certainly," he answered. "But do you think the American Smelting and Refining Company will submit to having its letters opened and read by a damned greaser? It's an outrage when an American corporation can't send a private letter to its employees! If this don't bring Intervention," he finished, darkly, "I don't know what will!"

There were all sorts of drummers for arms and ammunition companies, smugglers and contrabandistas; also a small, bantam man, the salesman for a portrait company, which made crayon enlargements from photographs at $5 apiece. He was scurrying around among the Mexicans, getting thousands of orders for pictures which were to be paid for upon delivery, and which; of course, could never be delivered. It was his first experience among Mexicans, and he was highly gratified by the hundreds of orders he had received. You see, a Mexican would just as soon order a portrait, or a piano, or an automobile as not, so long as he does not have to pay for it. It gives him a sense of wealth.

The little agent for crayon enlargements made one comment on the Mexican revolution. He said that General Huerta must be a fine man, because he understood he was distantly connected, on his mother's side, with the distinguished Carey family of Virginia!

The American bank of the river was patroled twice a day by details of cavalry, conscientiously paralleled on the Mexican side by companies of horsemen. Both parties watched each other narrowly across the Border. Every once in a while a Mexican, unable to restrain his nervousness, took a pot-shot at the Americans, and a small battle ensued as both parties scattered into the brush. A little way above Presidio were stationed two troops of the Negro Ninth Cavalry. One colored trooper, watering his horse on the bank of the river, was accosted by an English-speaking Mexican squatting on the opposite shore:

"Hey, coon!" he shouted, derisively, "when are you damned Gringos going to cross that line?"

"Chile!" responded the Negro. "We ain't agoin' to cross that line at all. We're just goin' to pick up that line an' carry it right down to the Big Ditch!"

Sometimes a rich refugee, with a good deal of gold sewed in his saddle-blankets, would get across the river without the Federals discovering it. There were six big, high-power automobiles in Presidio waiting for just such a victim. They would soak him one hundred dollars gold to make a trip to the railroad; and on the way, somewhere in the desolate wastes south of Marfa, he was almost sure to be held up by masked men and everything taken away from him. Upon these occasions the High Sheriff of Presidio County would bluster into town on a small pinto horse,—a figure true to the best tradition of "The Girl of the Golden West." He had read all Owen Wister's novels, and knew what a Western sheriff ought to look like: two revolvers on the hip, one slung under his arm, a large knife in his left boot, and an enormous shotgun over his saddle. His conversation was larded with the most fearful oaths, and he never caught any criminal. He spent all of his time enforcing the Presidio County law against carrying firearms and playing poker; and at night, after the day's work was done, you could always find him sitting in at a quiet game in the back of Kleinmann's store.

War and rumors of war kept Presidio at a fever heat. We all knew that sooner or later the Constitutionalist army would come overland from Chihuahua and attack Ojinaga. In fact, the major in command of the Border Patrol had already been approached by the Federal generals in a body to make arrangements for the retreat of the Federal army from Ojinaga under such circumstances. They said that when the rebels attacked they would want to resist for a respectable length of time,—say two hours,—and that then they would like permission to come across the river.

We knew that some twenty-five miles southward, at La Mula Pass, five hundred rebel volunteers guarded the only road from Ojinaga through the mountains. One day a courier sneaked through the Federal lines and across the river with important news. He said that the military band of the Federal army had been marching around the country practicing their music, and had been captured by the Constitutionalists, who stood them up in the market-place with rifles pointed at their heads, and made them play twelve hours at a stretch. "Thus," continued the message, "the hardships of life in the desert have been somewhat alleviated." We could never discover just how it was that the band happened to be practicing all alone twenty-two miles from Ojinaga in the desert.

For a month longer the Federals remained at Ojinaga, and Presidio throve. Then Villa, at the head of his army, appeared over a rise of the desert. The Federals resisted a respectable length of time—just two hours, or, to be exact, until Villa himself at the head of a battery galloped right up to the muzzles of the guns,—and then poured across the river in wild rout, were herded in a vast corral by the American soldiers, and afterward imprisoned in a barbed-wire stockade at Fort Bliss, Texas.

But by that time I was already far down in Mexico, riding across the desert with a hundred ragged Constitutionalist troopers on my way to the front.

PART ONE

DESERT WAR

CHAPTER I

URBINA'S COUNTRY

A peddler from Parral came into town with a mule-load of macuche,—you smoke macuche when you can't get tobacco,—and we strolled down with the rest of the population to get the news. This was in Magistral, a Durango mountain village three days' ride from the railroad. Somebody bought a little macuche, the rest of us borrowed from him, and we sent a boy for some corn-shucks. Everybody lit up, squatting around the peddler three deep; for it was weeks since the town had heard of the Revolution. He was full of the most alarming rumors: that the Federals had broken out of Torreon and were headed this way, burning ranches and murdering pacificos; that the United States troops had crossed the Rio Grande; that Huerta had resigned; that Huerta was coming north to take charge of the Federal troops in person; that Pascual Orozco had been shot at Ojinaga; that Pascual Orozco was coming south with ten thousand colorados. He retailed these reports with a wealth of dramatic gesture, stamping around until his heavy brown-and-gold sombrero wabbled on his head, tossing his faded blue blanket over his shoulder, firing imaginary rifles and drawing imaginary swords, while his audience murmured: "Ma!" and "Adio!" But the most interesting rumor was that General Urbina would leave for the front in two days.

A hostile Arab named Antonio Swayfeta happened to be driving to Parral in a two-wheeled gig the next morning, and allowed me to go with him as far as Las Nieves, where the General lives. By afternoon we had climbed out of the mountains to the great upland plain of Northern Durango, and were jogging down the mile-long waves of yellow prairie, stretching away so far that the grazing cattle dwindled into dots and finally disappeared at the base of the wrinkled purple mountains that seemed close enough to hit with a thrown stone. The Arab's hostility had thawed, and he poured out his life's story, not one word of which I could understand. But the drift of it, I gathered, was largely commercial. He had once been to El Paso and regarded it as the world's most beautiful city. But business was better in Mexico. They say that there are few Jews in Mexico because they cannot stand the competition of the Arabs.

We passed only one human being all that day—a ragged old man astride a burro, wrapped in a red-and-black checked serape, though without trousers, and hugging the broken stock of a rifle. Spitting, he volunteered that he was a soldier; that after three years of deliberation he had finally decided to join the Revolution and fight for Libertad. But at his first battle a cannon had been fired, the first he had ever heard; he had immediately started for his home in El Oro, where he intended to descend into a gold-mine and stay there until the war was over....

We fell silent, Antonio and I. Occasionally he addressed the mule in faultless Castilian. Once he informed me that that mule was "all heart" (pura corazon). The sun hung for a moment on the crest of the red porphyry mountains, and dropped behind them; the turquoise cup of sky held an orange powder of clouds. Then all the rolling leagues of desert glowed and came near in the soft light. Ahead suddenly reared the solid fortress of a big rancho, such as one comes on once a day in that vast land,—a mighty square of blank walls, with loop-holed towers at the corners, and an iron-studded gate. It stood grim and forbidding upon a little bare hill, like any castle, its adobe corrals around it; and below, in what had been a dry arroyo all day, the sunken river came to the surface in a pool, and disappeared again in the sand. Thin lines of smoke from within rose straight into the high last sunshine. From the river to the gate moved the tiny black figures of women with water-jars on their heads: and two wild horsemen galloped some cattle toward the corrals. Now the western mountains were blue velvet, and the pale sky a blood-stained canopy of watered silk. But by the time we reached the great gate of the rancho, above was only a shower of stars.

Antonio called for Don Jesus. It is always safe to call for Don Jesus at a rancho, for that is invariably the administrador's name. He finally appeared, a magnificently tall man in tight trousers, purple silk undershirt, and a gray sombrero heavily loaded with silver braid; and invited us in. The inside of the wall consisted of houses, running all the way around. Along the walls and over the doors hung festoons of jerked meat, and strings of peppers, and drying clothes. Three young girls crossed the square in single file, balancing ollas of water on their heads, shouting to each other in the raucous voices of Mexican women. At one house a woman crouched, nursing her baby; next door another kneeled to the interminable labor of grinding corn-meal in a stone trough. The men-folk squatted before little corn-husk fires, bundled in their faded serapes, smoking their hojas as they watched the women work. As we unharnessed they rose and gathered around, with soft-voiced "Bueno noches," curious and friendly. Where did we come from? Where going? What did we have of news? Had the Maderistas taken Ojinaga yet? Was it true that Orozco was coming to kill the pacificos? Did we know Panfilo Silveyra? He was a sergento, one of Urbina's men. He came from that house, was the cousin of this man. Ah, there was too much war!

Antonio departed to bargain for corn for the mule. "A tanito—just a little corn," he whined. "Surely Don Jesus wouldn't charge him anything.... Just so much corn as a mule could eat...!" At one of the houses I negotiated for dinner. The woman spread out both her hands. "We are all so poor now," she said. "A little water, some beans—tortillas.... It is all we eat in this house...." Milk? No. Eggs? No. Meat? No. Coffee? Valgame Dios, no! I ventured that with this money they might be purchased at one of the other houses. "Quien sabe?" replied she dreamily. At this moment arrived the husband and upbraided her for her lack of hospitality. "My house is at your orders," he said magnificently, and begged a cigarette. Then he squatted down while she brought forward the two family chairs and bade us seat ourselves. The room was of good proportions, with a dirt floor and a ceiling of heavy beams, the adobe showing through. Walls and ceiling were whitewashed, and, to the naked eye, spotlessly clean. In one corner was a big iron bed, and in the other a Singer sewing machine, as in every other house I saw in Mexico. There was also a spindle-legged table, upon which stood a picture-postcard of Our Lady of Guadelupe, with a candle burning before it. Above this, on the wall, hung an indecent illustration clipped from the pages of Le Rire, in a silver-gilt frame—evidently an object of the highest veneration.

Arrived now various uncles, cousins, and compadres, wondering casually if we dragged any cigarros. At her husband's command, the woman brought a live coal in her fingers. We smoked. It grew late. There developed a lively argument as to who would go and buy provisions for our dinner. Finally they compromised on the woman; and soon Antonio and I sat in the kitchen, while she crouched upon the altar-like adobe platform in the corner, cooking over the open fire. The smoke enveloped up, pouring out the door. Occasionally a pig or a few hens would wander in from the outside, or a sheep would make a dash for the tortilla meal, until the angry voice of the master of the house reminded the woman that she was not doing five or six things at once. And she would rise wearily and belabor the animal with a flaming brand.

All through our supper—jerked meat fiery with chile, fried eggs, tortillas, frijoles, and bitter black coffee,—the entire male population of the rancho bore us company, in the room and out. It seemed that some were especially prejudiced against the Church. "Priests without shame," cried one, "who come when we are so poor and take away a tenth of what we have!"

"And us paying a quarter to the Government for this cursed war!" ...

"Shut your mouth!" shrilled the woman. "It is for God! God must eat, the same as we...."

Her husband smiled a superior smile. He had once been to Jimenez and was considered a man of the world.

"God does not eat," he remarked with finality. "The curas grow fat on us."

"Why do you give it?" I asked.

"It is the law," said several at once.

And not one would believe that that law was repealed in Mexico in the year 1857!

I asked them about General Urbina. "A good man, all heart." And another: "He is very brave. The bullets bound off him like rain from a sombrero...." "He is the cousin of my woman's first husband's sister." "He is bueno para los negocios del campo" (that is to say, he is a highly successful bandit and highwayman). And finally one said proudly: "A few years ago he was just a peon like us; and now he is a General and a rich man."

But I shall not soon forget the hunger-pinched body and bare feet of an old man with the face of a saint, who said slowly: "The Revolucion is good. When it is done we shall starve never, never, never, if God is served. But it is long, and we have no food to eat, or clothes to wear. For the master has gone away from the hacienda, and we have no tools or animals to do our work with, and the soldiers take all our corn and drive away the cattle...."

"Why don't the pacificos fight?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "Now they do not need us. They have no rifles for us, or horses. They are winning. And who shall feed them if we do not plant corn? No, señor. But if the Revolucion loses, then there will be no more pacificos. Then we will rise, with our knives and our horsewhips.... The Revolucion will not lose...."

As Antonio and I rolled up in our blankets on the floor of the granary, they were singing. One of the young bucks had procured a guitar somewhere, and two voices, clinging to each other in that peculiar strident Mexican "barber-shop" harmony, were whining loudly something about a "trista historia d'amor."...

The rancho was one of many belonging to the Hacienda of El Canotillo, and all next day we drove through its wide lands, which covered more than two million acres, I was told. The hacendado, a wealthy Spaniard, had fled the country two years before.

"Who is owner now?"

"General Urbina," said Antonio. And it was so, as I soon saw. The great haciendas of Northern Durango, an area greater than the State of New Jersey, had been confiscated for the Constitutionalist government by the General, who ruled them with his own agents, and, it was said, divided fifty-fifty with the Revolution.

We drove steadily all day, only stopping long enough to eat a few tortillas. And along about sundown we saw the brown mud wall that hemmed El Canotillo round, with its city of little houses, and the ancient pink tower of its church among the alamo trees,—miles away at the foot of the mountains. The village of Las Nieves, a straggling collection of adobes the exact color of the earth of which they are built, lay before us, like some strange growth of the desert. A flashing river, without a trace of green along its banks to contrast it with the scorched plain, made a semi-circle around the town. And as we splashed across the ford, between the women kneeling there at their washing, the sun suddenly went behind the western mountains. Immediately a deluge of yellow light, thick as water, drowned the earth, and a golden mist rose from the ground, in which the cattle floated legless.

I knew that the price for such a journey as Antonio had carried me was at least ten pesos, and he was an Arab to boot. But when I offered him money, he threw his arms around me and burst into tears.... God bless you, excellent Arab! You are right; business is better in Mexico.

CHAPTER II

THE LION OF DURANGO AT HOME

At General Urbina's door sat an old peon with four cartridge-belts around him, engaged in the genial occupation of filling corrugated iron bombs with gunpowder. He jerked his thumb toward the patio. The General's house, corrals and storerooms ran around all four sides of a space as big as a city block, swarming with pigs, chickens and half-naked children. Two goats and three magnificent peacocks gazed pensively down from the roof. In and out of the sitting-room, whence came the phonographic strains of the "Dollar Princess," stalked a train of hens. An old woman came from the kitchen and dumped a bucket of garbage on the ground; all the pigs made a squealing rush for it. In a corner of the house-wall sat the General's baby daughter, chewing on a cartridge. A group of men stood or sprawled on the ground around a well in the center of the patio. The General himself sat in their midst, in a broken wicker arm-chair, feeding tortillas to a tame deer and a lame black sheep. Before him kneeled a peon, pouring from a canvas sack some hundreds of Mauser cartridges.

To my explanations the General returned no answer. He gave me a limp hand, immediately withdrawing it, but did not rise. A broad, medium-sized man of dark mahogany complexion, with a sparse black beard up to his cheek-bones, that didn't hide the wide, thin, expressionless mouth, the gaping nostrils, the shiny, small, humorous, animal eyes. For a good five minutes he never took them from mine. I produced my papers.

"I don't know how to read," said the General suddenly, motioning to his secretary. "So you want to go with me to battle?" he shot at me in the coarsest Spanish. "Many bullets!" I said nothing. "Muy bien! But I don't know when I shall go. Maybe in five days. Now eat!"

"Thanks, my general, I've already eaten."

"Go and eat," he repeated calmly. "Andale!"

A dirty little man they all called Doctor escorted me to the dining-room. He had once been an apothecary in Parral, but was now a Major. We were to sleep together that night, he said. But before we reached the dining-room there was a shout of "Doctor!" A wounded man had arrived, a peasant with his sombrero in his hand, and a blood-clotted handkerchief around his head. The little doctor became all efficiency. He dispatched a boy for the family scissors, another for a bucket of water from the well. He sharpened with his knife a stick he picked up from the ground. Seating the man on a box, he took off the bandage, revealing a cut about two inches long, caked with dirt and dried blood. First he cut off the hair around the wound, jabbing the points of the scissors carelessly into it. The man drew in his breath sharply, but did not move. Then the doctor slowly cut the clotted blood away from the top, whistling cheerfully to himself. "Yes," he remarked, "it is an interesting life, the doctor's." He peered closely at the vomiting blood; the peasant sat like a sick stone. "And it is a life full of nobility," continued the doctor. "Alleviating the sufferings of others." Here he picked up the sharpened stick, thrust it deep in, and slowly worked it the entire length of the cut!

"Pah! The animal has fainted!" said the doctor. "Here, hold him up while I wash it!" With that he lifted the bucket and poured its contents over the head of the patient, the water and blood dribbling down over his clothes. "These ignorant peons," said the doctor, binding up the wound in its original bandage, "have no courage. It is the intelligence that makes the soul, eh?" ...

When the peasant came to, I asked: "Are you a soldier?" The man smiled a sweet, deprecating smile.

"No, señor, I am only a pacifico," he said. "I live in the Canotillo, where my house is at your orders...."

Some time later—a good deal—we all sat down to supper. There was Lieutenant-Colonel Pablo Seañes, a frank, engaging youth of twenty-six, with five bullets in him to pay for the three years' fighting. His conversation was sprinkled with soldierly curses, and his pronunciation was a little indistinct, the result of a bullet on the jaw-bone and a tongue almost cut in two by a sword. He was a demon in the field, they said, and a killer (muy matador) after it. At the first taking of Torreon, Pablo and two other officers, Major Fierro and Captain Borunda, had executed alone eighty unarmed prisoners, each man shooting them down with his revolver until his hand got tired pulling the trigger.

"Oiga!*" Pablo said. "Where is the best institute for the study of hypnotism in the United States? ... As soon as this cursed war is over I am going to study to become a hypnotist...." With that he turned and began to make passes at Lieutenant Borrega, who was called derisively "The Lion of the Sierras," because of his prodigious boasting. The latter jerked out his revolver: "I want no business with the devil!" he screamed, amid the uproarious laughter of the others.

Then there was Captain Fernando, a grizzled giant of a man in tight trousers, who had fought twenty-one battles. He took the keenest delight in my fragmentary Spanish, and every word I spoke sent him into bellows of laughter that shook down the adobe from the ceiling. He had never been out of Durango, and declared that there was a great sea between the United States and Mexico, and that he believed all the rest of the earth to be water. Next to him sat Longinos Güereca, with a row of decayed teeth across his round, gentle face every time he smiled, and a record for simple bravery that was famous throughout the army. He was twenty-one, and already First Captain. He told me that last night his own men had tried to kill him.... Then came Patricio, the best rider of wild horses in the State, and Fidencio next to him, a pure-blooded Indian seven feet tall, who always fought standing up. And last Raphael Zalarzo, a tiny hunchback that Urbina carried in his train to amuse him, like any medieval Italian duke.

When we had burned our throats with the last enchilada, and scooped up our last frijole with a tortilla,—forks and spoons being unknown,—the gentlemen each took a mouthful of water, gargled it, and spat it on the floor. As I came out into the patio, I saw the figure of the General emerge from his bedroom door, staggering slightly. In his hand he carried a revolver. He stood for a moment in the light of another door, then suddenly went in, banging it behind him.

I was already in bed when the doctor came into the room. In the other bed reposed the Lion of the Sierras and his momentary mistress, now loudly snoring.

"Yes," said the Doctor, "there has been some little trouble. The General has not been able to walk for two months from rheumatism.... And sometimes he is in great pain, and comforts himself with aguardiente.... To-night he tried to shoot his mother. He always tries to shoot his mother .... because he loves her very much." The Doctor peeped at himself in the mirror, and twisted his mustache. "This Revolucion. Do not mistake. It is a fight of the poor against the rich. I was very poor before the Revolucion and now I am very rich." He pondered a moment, and then began removing his clothes. Through his filthy undershirt the Doctor honored me with his one English sentence: "I have mooch lices," he said, with a proud smile....

I went out at dawn and walked around Las Nieves. The town belongs to General Urbina, people, houses, animals and immortal souls. At Las Nieves he and he alone wields the high justice and the low. The town's only store is in his house, and I bought some cigarettes from the Lion of the Sierras, who was detailed store-clerk for the day. In the patio the General was talking with his mistress, a beautiful, aristocratic-looking woman, with a voice like a hand-saw. When he noticed me he came up and shook hands, saying that he'd like to have me take some pictures of him. I said that that was my purpose in life, and asked him if he thought he would leave soon for the front. "In about ten days, I think," he answered. I began to get uncomfortable.

"I appreciate your hospitality, my General," I told him, "but my work demands that I be where I can see the actual advance upon Torreon. If it is convenient, I should like to go back to Chihuahua and join General Villa, who will soon go south." Urbina's expression didn't change, but he shot at me: "What is it that you don't like here? You are in your own house! Do you want cigarettes? Do you want aguardiente; or sotol, or cognac? Do you want a woman to warm your bed at night? Everything you want I can give you! Do you want a pistol? A horse? Do you want money?" He jerked a handful of silver dollars from his pocket and threw them jingling on the ground at my feet.

I said: "Nowhere in Mexico am I so happy and contented as in this house." And I was prepared to go further.

For the next hour I took photographs of General Urbina: General Urbina on foot, with and without sword; General Urbina on three different horses; General Urbina with and without his family; General Urbina's three children, on horseback and off; General Urbina's mother, and his mistress; the entire family, armed with swords and revolvers, including the phonograph, produced for the purpose, one of the children holding a placard upon which was inked: "General Tomas Urbina R."

CHAPTER III

THE GENERAL GOES TO WAR

We had finished breakfast and I was resigning myself to the ten days in Las Nieves, when the General suddenly changed his mind. He came out of his room, roaring orders. In five minutes the house was all bustle and confusion,—officers rushing to pack their serapes, mozos and troopers saddling horses, peons with armfuls of rifles rushing to and fro. Patricio harnessed five mules to the great coach,—an exact copy of the Deadwood Stage. A courier rode out on the run to summon the Tropa, which was quartered at the Canotillo. Rafaelito loaded the General's baggage into the coach; it consisted of a typewriter, four swords, one of them bearing the emblem of the Knights of Pythias, three uniforms, the General's branding-iron, and a twelve-gallon demijohn of sotol.

And there came the Tropa, a ragged smoke of brown dust miles along the road. Ahead flew a little, squat, black figure, with the Mexican flag streaming over him; he wore a floppy sombrero loaded with five pounds of tarnished gold braid,—once probably the pride of some imperial hacendado. Following him closely were Manuel Paredes, with riding boots up to his hips, fastened with silver buckles the size of dollars, beating his mount with the flat of a saber; Isidro Amayo, making his horse buck by flapping a hat in his eyes; José Valiente, ringing his immense silver spurs inlaid with turquoises; Jesus Mancilla, his flashing brass chain around his neck; Julian Reyes, with colored pictures of Christ and the Virgin fastened to the front of his sombrero; a struggling tangle of six behind, with Antonio Guzman trying to lasso them, the coils of his horsehair rope soaring out of the dust. They came on the dead run, all Indian shouts and cracking revolvers, until they were only a hundred feet away, then jerked their little cow-ponies cruelly to a staggering halt with bleeding mouths, a whirling confusion of men, horses and dust.

This was the Tropa when I first saw them. About a hundred, they were, in all stages of picturesque raggedness; some wore overalls, others the charro jackets of peons, while one or two sported tight vaquero trousers. A few had shoes, most of them only cowhide sandals, and the rest were barefooted. Sabas Gutierrez was garbed in an ancient frockcoat, split up the back for riding. Rifles slung at their saddles, four or five cartridge-belts crossed over their chests, high, flapping sombreros, immense spurs chiming as they rode, bright-colored serapes strapped on behind—this was their uniform.

The General was with his mother. Outside the door crouched his mistress, weeping, her three children around her. For almost an hour we waited, then Urbina suddenly burst out of the door. With scarcely a look at his family, he leaped on his great, gray charger, and spurred furiously into the street. Juan Sanchez blew a blast on his cracked bugle, and the Tropa, with the General at its head, took the Canotillo road.

In the meanwhile Patricio and I loaded three cases of dynamite and a case of bombs into the boot of the coach. I got up beside Patricio, the peons let go of the mules' heads, and the long whip curled around their bellies. Galloping, we whirled out of the village, and took the steep bank of the river at twenty miles an hour. Away on the other side, the Tropa trotted along a more direct road. The Canotillo we passed without stopping.

"Arré mulas! Putas! Hijas de la Ho——!" yelled Patricio, the whip hissing. The Camino Real was a mere track on uneven ground; every time we took a little arroyo the dynamite came down with a sickening crash. Suddenly a rope broke, and one case bounced off the coach and fell upon rocks. It was a cool morning, however, and we strapped it on again safely....

Almost every hundred yards along the road were little heaps of stones, surmounted by wooden crosses,—each one the memorial of a murder. And occasionally a tall, whitewashed cross uprose in the middle of a side-road, to protect some little desert rancho from the visits of the devil. Black shiny chaparral, the height of a mule's back, scraped the side of the coach; Spanish bayonet and the great barrel-cactus watched us like sentinels from the skyline of the desert. And always the mighty Mexican vultures circled over us, as if they knew we were going to war.

Late in the afternoon the stone wall which bounds the million acres of the Hacienda of Torreon de Cañas swung into sight on our left, marching across deserts and mountains like the Great Wall of China, for more than thirty miles; and, soon afterward, the hacienda itself. The Tropa had dismounted around the Big House. They said that General Urbina had suddenly been taken violently sick, and would probably be unable to leave his bed for a week.

The Casa Grande, a magnificent porticoed palace but one story high, covered the entire top of a desert rise. From its doorway one could see fifteen miles of yellow, rolling plain, and, beyond, the interminable ranges of bare mountains piled upon each other. Back of it lay the great corrals and stables, where the Tropa's evening fires already sent up myriad columns of yellow smoke. Below, in the hollow, more than a hundred peons' houses made a vast open square, where children and animals romped together, and the women kneeled at their eternal grinding of corn. Out on the desert a troop of vaqueros rode slowly home; and from the river, a mile away, the endless chain of black-shawled women carried water on their heads.... It is impossible to imagine how close to nature the peons live on these great haciendas. Their very houses are built of the earth upon which they stand, baked by the sun. Their food is the corn they grow; their drink the water from the dwindled river, carried painfully upon their heads; the clothes they wear are spun from the wool, and their sandals cut from the hide of a newly slaughtered steer. The animals are their constant companions, familiars of their houses. Light and darkness are their day and night. When a man and a woman fall in love they fly to each other without the formalities of a courtship,—and when they are tired of each other they simply part. Marriage is very costly (six pesos to the priest), and is considered a very swagger extra; but it is no more binding than the most casual attachment. And of course jealousy is a stabbing matter.

We dined in one of the lofty, barren salas of the Casa Grande; a room with a ceiling eighteen feet high, and walls of noble proportions, covered with cheap American wallpaper. A gigantic mahogany sideboard occupied one side of the place, but we had no knives and forks. There was a tiny fireplace, in which a fire was never lighted, yet the chill of death abode there day and night. The room next door was hung with heavy, spotted brocade, though there was no rug on the concrete floor. No pipes and no plumbing in all the house,—you went to the well or the river for water. And candles the only light! Of course the dueño had long fled the country; but the hacienda in its prime must have been as splendid and as uncomfortable as a medieval castle.

The cura or priest of the hacienda church presided at dinner. To him were brought the choicest viands, which he sometimes passed to his favorites after helping himself. We drank sotol and aguamiel, while the cura made away with a whole bottle of looted anisette. Exhilarated by this, His Reverence descanted upon the virtues of the confessional, especially where young girls were concerned. He also made us understand that he possessed certain feudal rights over new brides. "The girls, here," he said, "are very passionate...."

I noticed that the rest didn't laugh much at this, though they were outwardly respectful. After we were out of the room, José Valiente hissed, shaking so that he could hardly speak: "I know the dirty ——! And my sister...! The Revolucion will have something to say about these curas!" Two high Constitutionalist officers afterward hinted at a little-known program to drive the priests out of Mexico; and Villa's hostility to the curas is well known.

Patricio was harnessing the coach when I came out in the morning, and the Tropa were saddling up. The doctor, who was remaining with the General, strolled up to my friend, Trooper Juan Vallejo.

"That's a pretty horse you've got there," he said, "and a nice rifle. Lend them to me."

"But I haven't any other——" began Juan.

"I am your superior officer," returned the doctor. And that was the last we ever saw of doctor, horse and rifle.

I said farewell to the General, who was lying in torture in bed, sending bulletins to his mother by telephone every fifteen minutes. "May you journey happily," he said. "Write the truth. I commend you to Pablito."

CHAPTER IV

LA TROPA ON THE MARCH

And so I got inside the coach, with Rafaelito, Pablo Seañes, and his mistress. She was a strange creature. Young, slender, and beautiful, she was poison and a stone to everybody but Pablo. I never saw her smile and never heard her say a gentle word. Sometimes she treated us with dull ferocity; sometimes with bestial indifference. But Pablo she cradled like a baby. When he lay across the seat with his head in her lap, she would hug it fiercely to her breast, making noises like a tigress with her young.

Patricio handed down his guitar from the box, where he kept it, and to Rafael's accompaniment the Lieutenant-Colonel sang love-ballads in a cracked voice. Every Mexican knows hundreds of these. They are not written down, but often composed extemporaneously, and handed along by word of mouth. Some of them are very beautiful, some grotesque, and others as satirical as any French popular song. He sang:

"Exiled I wandered through the world—

Exiled by the government.

I came back at the end of the year,

Drawn by the fondness of love.

I went away with the purpose

Of staying away forever.

And the love of a woman was the only thing

That made me come back."

And then "Los Hijos de la Noche":

"I am of the children of the night

Who wander aimlessly in the darkness.

The beautiful moon with its golden rays

Is the companion of my sorrows.

"I am going to lose myself from thee,

Exhausted with weeping;

I am going sailing, sailing,

By the shores of the sea.

"You will see at the time of our parting

I will not allow you to love another.

For if so it should be, I would ruin your face.

And many blows we would give one another.

"So I am going to become an American.

Go with God, Antonia.

Say farewell to my friends.

O may the Americans allow me to pass

And open a saloon

On the other side of the River!"

The Hacienda of El Centro turned out to give us lunch. And there Fidencio offered me his horse to ride for the afternoon.

The Tropa had already ridden on ahead, and I could see them, strung out for half a mile in the black mesquite brush, the tiny red-white-and-green flag bobbing at their head. The mountains had withdrawn somewhere beyond the horizon, and we rode in the midst of a great bowl of desert, rolling up at the edges to meet the furnace-blue of the Mexican sky. Now that I was out of the coach, a great silence, and a peace beyond anything I ever felt, wrapped me around. It is almost impossible to get objective about the desert; you sink into it,—become a part of it. Galloping along, I soon caught up with the Tropa.

"Aye, meester!" they shouted. "Here comes meester on a horse! Que tal, meester? How goes it? Are you going to fight with us?"

But Captain Fernando at the head of the column turned and roared: "Come here, meester!" The big man was grinning with delight. "You shall ride with me," he shouted, clapping me on the back. "Drink, now," and he produced a bottle of sotol about half full. "Drink it all. Show you're a man." "It's too much," I laughed. "Drink it," yelled the chorus as the Tropa crowded up to see. I drank it. A howl of laughter and applause went up. Fernando leaned over and gripped my hand. "Good for you, compañero!" he bellowed, rolling with mirth. The men crowded around, amused and interested. Was I going to fight with them? Where did I come from? What was I doing? Most of them had never heard of reporters, and one hazarded the opinion darkly that I was a Gringo and a Porfirista, and ought to be shot.

The rest, however, were entirely opposed to this view. No Porfirista would possibly drink that much sotol at a gulp. Isidro Amayo declared that he had been in a brigade in the first Revolution which was accompanied by a reporter, and that he was called Corresponsal de Guerra. Did I like Mexico? I said: "I am very fond of Mexico. I like Mexicans too. And I like sotol, aguardiente, mescal, tequila, pulque, and other Mexican customs!" They shouted with laughter.

Captain Fernando leaned over and patted my arm. "Now you are with the men (los hombres.) When we win the Revolucion it will be a government by the men,—not by the rich. We are riding over the lands of the men. They used to belong to the rich, but now they belong to me and to the compañeros."

"And you will be the army?" I asked.

"When the Revolucion is won," was the astonishing reply, "there will be no more army. The men are sick of armies. It is by armies that Don Porfirio robbed us."

"But if the United States should invade Mexico?"

A perfect storm broke everywhere. "We are more valiente than the Americanos—The cursed Gringos would get no further south than Juarez—Let's see them try it—We'd drive them back over the Border on the run, and burn their capital the next day...!"

"No," said Fernando, "you have more money and more soldiers. But the men would protect us. We need no army. The men would be fighting for their houses and their women."

"What are you fighting for?" I asked. Juan Sanchez, the color-bearer, looked at me curiously. "Why, it is good, fighting. You don't have to work in the mines...!"

Manuel Paredes said: "We are fighting to restore Francisco I. Madero to the Presidency." This extraordinary statement is printed in the program of the Revolution. And everywhere the Constitutionalist soldiers are known as "Maderistas." "I knew him," continued Manuel, slowly. "He was always laughing, always."

"Yes," said another, "whenever there was any trouble with a man, and all the rest wanted to fight him or put him in prison, Pancho Madero said: 'Just let me talk to him a few minutes. I can bring him around.'"

"He loved bailes," an Indian said. "Many a time I've seen him dance all night, and all the next day, and the next night. He used to come to the great Haciendas and make speeches. When he began the peons hated him; when he ended they were crying...."

Here a man broke out into a droning, irregular tune, such as always accompanies the popular ballads that spring up in thousands on every occasion:

"In Nineteen hundred and ten

Madero was imprisoned

In the National Palace

The eighteenth of February

"Four days he was imprisoned

In the Hall of the Intendancy

Because he did not wish

To renounce the Presidency

"Then Blanquet and Felix Diaz

Martyred him there

They were the hangmen

Feeding on his hate.

"They crushed....

Until he fainted

With play of cruelty

To make him resign.

"Then with hot irons

They burned him without mercy

And only unconsciousness

Calmed the awful flames.

"But it was all in vain

Because his mighty courage

Preferred rather to die

His was a great heart!

"This was the end of the life

Of him who was the redeemer

Of the Indian Republic

And of all the poor.

"They took him out of the Palace

And tell us he was killed in an assault

What a cynicism!

What a shameless lie!

"O Street of Lecumberri

Your cheerfulness has ended forever

For through you passed Madero

To the Penitentiary.

"That twenty-second of February

Will always be remembered in the Indian Republic.

God has pardoned him

And the Virgin of Guadelupe.

"Good-bye Beautiful Mexico

Where our leader died

Good-bye to the palace

Whence he issued a living corpse

"Señores, there is nothing eternal

Nor anything sincere in life

See what happened to Don Francisco I. Madero!'

By the time he was half-way through, the entire Tropa was humming the tune, and when he finished there was a moment of jingling silence.

"We are fighting," said Isidro Amayo, "for Libertad."

"What do you mean by Libertad?"

"Libertad is when I can do what I want!"

"But suppose it hurts somebody else?"

He shot back at me Benito Juarez' great sentence:

"Peace is the respect for the rights of others!"

I wasn't prepared for that. It startled me, this barefooted meztizo's conception of Liberty. I submit that it is the only correct definition of Liberty—to do what I want to! Americans quote it to me triumphantly as an instance of Mexican irresponsibility. But I think it is a better definition than ours—Liberty is the right to do what the Courts want. Every Mexican schoolboy knows the definition of peace and seems to understand pretty well what it means, too. But, they say, Mexicans don't want peace. That is a lie, and a foolish one. Let Americans take the trouble to go through the Maderista army, asking whether they want peace or not! The people are sick of war.

But, just to be square, I'll have to report Juan Sanchez' remark:

"Is there war in the United States now?" he asked.

"No," I said untruthfully.

"No war at all?" He meditated for a moment. "How do you pass the time, then...?"

Just about then somebody saw a coyote sneaking through the brush, and the entire Tropa gave chase with a whoop. They scattered rollicking over the desert, the late sun flashing from cartridge-belts and spurs, the ends of their bright serapes flying out behind. Beyond them, the scorched world sloped gently up, and a range of far lilac mountains jumped in the heat waves like a bucking horse. By here, if tradition is right, passed the steel-armored Spaniards in their search for gold, a blaze of crimson and silver that has left the desert cold and dull ever since. And, topping a rise, we came upon the first sight of the Hacienda of La Mimbrera, a walled enclosure of houses strong enough to stand a siege, stretching steeply down a hill, with the magnificent Casa Grande at the top.

In front of this house, which had been sacked and burned by Orozco's General, Che Che Campa, two years before, the coach was drawn up. A huge fire had been kindled, and ten compañeros were slaughtering sheep. Into the red glare of the firelight they staggered, with the struggling, squealing sheep in their arms, its blood fountaining upon the ground, shining in the fierce light like something phosphorescent.

The officers and I dined in the house of the administrador Don Jesus, the most beautiful specimen of manhood I have ever seen. He was much over six feet tall, slender, white-skinned—a pure Spanish type of the highest breed. At one end of his dining-room, I remember, hung a placard embroidered in red, white and green: "Viva Mexico!" and at the other, a second, which read: "Viva Jesus!"

It was after dinner, as I stood at the fire, wondering where I was to sleep, that Captain Fernando touched me on the arm.

"Will you sleep with the compañeros?"

We walked across the great open square, in the furious light of the desert stars, to a stone store-house set apart. Inside, a few candles stuck against the wall illumined the rifles stacked in the corners, the saddles on the floor, and the blanket-rolled compañeros with their heads on them. One or two were awake, talking and smoking. In a corner, three sat muffled in their serapes, playing cards. Five or six had voices and a guitar. They were singing "Pascual Orozco," beginning:

"They say that Pascual Orozco has turned his coat

Because Don Terrazzas seduced him;

They gave him many millions and they bought him

And sent him to overthrow the government.

"Orozco believed it

And to the war he went;

But the Maderista cannon

Was his calamity.

"If to thy window shall come Porfirio Diaz,

Give him for charity some cold tortillas;

If to thy window shall come General Huerta,

Spit in his face and slam the door.

"If to thy window shall come Inez Salazar,

Lock your trunk so that he can't steal;

If to thy window shall come Maclovio Herrera,

Give him dinner and put the cloth on the table."

They didn't distinguish me at first, but soon one of the card-players said: "Here comes Meester!" At that the others roused, and woke the rest. "That's right—it's good to sleep with the hombres—take this place, amigo—here's my saddle—here there is no crookedness—here a man goes straight...."

"May you pass a happy night, compañero," they said. "Till morning, then."

Pretty soon somebody shut the door. The room became full of smoke and fetid with human breath. What little silence was left from the chorus of snoring was entirely obliterated by the singing, which kept up, I guess, until dawn. The compañeros had fleas....

But I rolled up in my blankets and lay down upon the concrete floor very happily. And I slept better than I had before in Mexico.

At dawn we were in the saddle, larking up a steep roll of barren desert to get warm. It was bitter cold. The Tropa were wrapped in serapes up to their eyes, so that they looked like colored toadstools under their great sombreros. The level rays of the sun, burning as they fell upon my face, caught them unaware, glorifying the serapes to more brilliant colors than they possessed. Isidro Amayo's was of deep blue and yellow spirals; Juan Sanchez had one brick red, Captain Fernando's was green and cerise; against them flashed a purple and black zigzag pattern....

We looked back to see the coach pulled to a stop, and Patricio waving to us. Two of the mules had given out, raw from the traces, and tottering with the fatigue of the last two days. The Tropa scattered to look for mules. Soon they came back, driving two great beautiful animals that had never seen harness. No sooner had they smelled the coach than they made a desperate break for freedom. And now the Tropa instantly went back to their native profession—they became vaqueros. It was a pretty sight, the rope-coils swinging in the air, the sudden snake-like shoot of the loops, the little horses bracing themselves against the shock of the running mule. Those mules were demons. Time after time they broke the riatas; twice they overturned horse and rider. Pablo came to the rescue. He got on Sabas's horse, drove in the spurs, and went after one mule. In three minutes he had roped him by the leg, thrown him, and tied him. Then he took the second with equal dispatch. It was not for nothing that Pablo was Lieutenant-Colonel at twenty-six. Not only could he fight better than his men, but he could ride better, rope better, shoot better, chop wood better, and dance better.

The mules' legs were tied, and they were dragged with ropes to the coach, where the harness was slipped on them in spite of their frantic struggles. When all was ready, Patricio got on the box, seized the whip, and told us to cut away. The wild animals scrambled to their feet, bucking and squealing. Above the uproar came the crack of the heavy whip, and Patricio's bellow: "Andale! Ujos de la Gran' Ch——!" and they jerked forward, running, the big coach taking the arroyos like an express train. Soon it vanished behind its own pall of dust, and appeared hours afterward, crawling up the side of a great hill, miles away....

Panchito was eleven years old, already a trooper with a rifle too heavy for him, and a horse that they had to lift him on. His compadre was Victoriano, a veteran of fourteen. Seven others of the Tropa were under seventeen. And there was a sullen, Indian-faced woman, riding side-saddle, who wore two cartridge-belts. She rode with the hombres—slept with them in the cuartels.

"Why are you fighting?" I asked her.

She jerked her head toward the fierce figure of Julian Reyes.

"Because he is," she answered. "He who stands under a good tree is sheltered by a good shade."

"A good rooster will crow in any chicken-coop," capped Isidro.

"A parrot is green all over," chimed in someone else.

"Faces we see, but hearts we do not comprehend," said José, sentimentally.

At noon we roped a steer, and cut his throat. And because there was no time to build a fire, we ripped the meat from the carcase and ate it raw.

"Oiga, meester," shouted José. "Do the United States soldiers eat raw meat?"

I said I didn't think they did.

"It is good for the hombres. In the campaign we have no time for anything but carne crudo. It makes us brave."

By late afternoon we had caught up with the coach, and galloped with it down through the dry arroyo and up through the other side, past the great ribota court that flanks the Hacienda of La Zarca. Unlike La Mimbrera, the Casa Grande here stands on a level place, with the peons' houses in long rows at its flanks, and a flat desert barren of chaparral for twenty miles in front. Che Che Campa also paid a visit to La Zarca. The big house is a black and gaping ruin.

CHAPTER V

WHITE NIGHTS AT ZARCA

Of course, I took up quarters at the cuartel. And right here I want to mention one fact. Americans had insisted that the Mexican was fundamentally dishonest—that I might expect to have my outfit stolen the first day out. Now for two weeks I lived with as rough a band of ex-outlaws as there was in the army. They were without discipline and without education. They were, many of them, Gringo-haters. They had not been paid a cent for six weeks, and some were so desperately poor that they couldn't boast sandals or serapes. I was a stranger with a good outfit, unarmed. I had a hundred and fifty pesos, which I put conspicuously at the head of my bed when I slept. And I never lost a thing. But more than that, I was not permitted to pay for my food; and in a company where money was scarce and tobacco almost unknown, I was kept supplied with all I could smoke by the compañeros. Every suggestion from me that I should pay for it was an insult.

The only thing possible was to hire music for a baile. Long after Juan Sanchez and I rolled up in our blankets that night, we could hear the rhythm of the music, and the shouts of the dancers. It must have been midnight when somebody threw open the door and yelled: "Meester! Oiga, meester! Are you asleep? Come to the baile! Arriba! Andale!"

"Too sleepy!" I said. After some further argument the messenger departed, but in ten minutes back he came. "El Capitan Fernando orders you to come at once! Vamonos!" Now the others woke up. "Come to the baile, meester!" they shouted. Juan Sanchez sat up and began pulling on his shoes. "Now we're off!" said he. "The meester is going to dance! Captain's orders! Come on, meester!"

"I'll go if all the Tropa does," I said. They raised a yell at that, and the night was full of chuckling men pulling on their clothes.

Twenty of us reached the house in a body. The mob of peons blocking door and window opened to let us pass. "The meester!" they cried. "The meester's going to dance!"

Capitan Fernando threw his arms about me, roaring: "Here he comes, the compañero! Dance now! Go to it! They're going to dance the jota!"

"But I don't know how to dance the jota!"

Patricio, flushed and panting, seized me by the arm. "Come on, it's easy! I'll introduce you to the best girl in the Zarca!"

There was nothing to do. The window was jammed with faces, and a hundred tried to crowd in at the door. It was an ordinary room in a peon's house, whitewashed, with a humpy dirt floor. In the light of two candles sat the musicians. The music struck up "Puentes á Chihuahua." A grinning silence fell. I gathered the young lady under my arm, and started the preliminary march around the room customary before the dance begins. We waltzed painfully for a moment or two, and suddenly they all began to yell: "Ora! Ora! Now!"

"What do you do now?"

"Vuelta! Vuelta! Loose her!" a perfect yell.

"But I don't know how!"

"The fool doesn't know how to dance," cried one.

Another began the mocking song:

"The Gringos all are fools,

They've never been in Sonora,

And when they want to say: 'Diez Reales,'

They call it 'Dollar an' a quarta' ...."

But Patricio bounded into the middle of the floor, and Sabas after him; each seized a muchacha from the line of women sitting along one end of the room. And as I led my partner back to her seat, they "vuelta'd." First a few waltz steps,—then the man whirled away from the girl, snapping his fingers, throwing one arm up to cover his face, while the girl put one hand on her hip and danced after him. They approached each other, receded, danced around each other. The girls were dumpy and dull, Indian-faced and awkward, bowed at the shoulder from much grinding of corn and washing of clothes. Some of the men had on heavy boots, some none; many wore pistols and cartridge-belts, and a few carried rifles slung from their shoulders.

The dance was always preceded by a grand march-around; then, after the couple had danced twice the circuit of the room, they walked again. There were two-steps, waltz and mazurka beside the jota. Each girl kept her eyes on the ground, never spoke, and stumbled heavily after you. Add to this a dirt floor full of arroyos, and you have a form of torture unequaled anywhere in the world. It seemed to me I danced for hours, spurred on by the chorus: "Dance, meester! No floje! Keep it up! Don't quit!"

Later there was another jota, and here's where I almost got into trouble. I danced this one successfully—with another girl. And, afterward, when I asked my original partner to two-step, she was furiously angry.

"You shamed me before them all," said she. "You—you said you didn't know how to dance the jota!" As we marched around the room, she appealed to her friends: "Domingo! Juan! Come out and take me away from this Gringo! He won't dare to do anything!"

Half a dozen of them started onto the floor, and the rest looked on. It was a ticklish moment. But all at once the good Fernando glided in front, a revolver in his hand.

"The Americano is my friend!" said he. "Get back there and mind your business!..."

The horses were tired, so we rested a day in La Zarca. Behind the Casa Grande lay a ruined garden, full of gray alamo trees, figs, vines, and great barrel-cactuses. It was walled around by high adobe walls on three sides, over one of which the ancient white tower of the church floated in the blue sky. The fourth side opened upon a reservoir of yellow water, and beyond it stretched the western desert, miles upon miles of tawny desolation. Trooper Marin and I lay under a fig tree, watching the vultures sail over us on quiet wing. Suddenly the silence was broken by loud, swift music.

Pablo had found a pianola in the church, where it had escaped Che Che Campa's notice the previous year; with it was one roll, the "Merry Widow Waltz." Nothing would do but that we carry the instrument out into the ruined patio. We took turns playing the thing all day long; Rafaelito volunteering the information that the "Merry Widow" was Mexico's most popular piece. A Mexican, he said, had composed it.

The finding of the pianola suggested that we give another baile that night, in the portico of the Casa Grande itself. Candles were stuck upon the pillars, the faint light flickering upon broken walls, burned and blackened doorways, the riot of wild vines that had twisted unchecked around the roof-beams. The entire patio was crowded with blanketed men, making holiday, even yet a little uncomfortable in the great house which they had never been allowed to enter. As soon as the orchestra had finished a dance, the pianola immediately took up the task. Dance followed dance, without any rest. A barrel of sotol further complicated things. As the evening wore on the assembly got more and more exhilarated. Sabas, who was Pablo's orderly, led off with Pablo's mistress. I followed. Immediately afterward Pablo hit her on the head with the butt end of his revolver, and said he'd shoot her if she danced with anyone else, and her partner too. After sitting some moments meditating, Sabas rose, pulled his revolver, and informed the harpist that he had played a wrong note. Then he shot at him. Other compañeros disarmed Sabas, who immediately went to sleep in the middle of the dance-floor.

The interest in Meester's dancing soon shifted to other phenomena. I sat down beside Julian Reyes, he with the Christ and Virgin on the front of his sombrero. He was far gone in sotol—his eyes burned like a fanatic's.

He turned on me suddenly:

"Are you going to fight with us?"

"No," I said. "I am a correspondent. I am forbidden to fight."

"It is a lie," he cried. "You don't fight because you are afraid to fight. In the face of God, our Cause is Just."

"Yes, I know that. But my orders are not to fight."

"What do I care for orders?" he shrieked. "We want no correspondents. We want no words printed in a book. We want rifles and killing, and if we die we shall be caught up among the saints! Coward! Huertista!..."

"That's enough!" cried someone, and I looked up to see Longinos Güereca standing over me. "Julian Reyes, you know nothing. This compañero comes thousands of miles by the sea and the land to tell his countrymen the truth of the fight for Liberty. He goes into battle without arms, he's braver than you are, because you have a rifle. Get out now, and don't bother him any more!"

He sat down where Julian had been, smiled his homely, gentle smile, and took both my hands in his.

"We shall be compadres, eh?" said Longinos Güereca. "We shall sleep in the same blankets, and always be together. And when we get to the Cadena I shall take you to my home, and my father shall make you my brother.... I will show you the lost gold-mines of the Spaniards, the richest mines in the world.... We'll work them together, eh? ... We'll be rich, eh?..."

And from that time on until the end, Longinos Güereca and I were always together.

But the baile grew wilder and wilder. Orchestra and pianola alternated without a break. Everybody was drunk now. Pablo was boasting horribly of killing defenseless prisoners. Occasionally, some insult would be passed, and there would be a snapping of rifle levers all over the place. Then perhaps the poor exhausted women would begin to go home; and what an ominous shout would go up: "No vaya! Don't go! Stop! Come back here and dance! Come back here!" And the dejected procession would halt and straggle back. At four o'clock, when somebody started the report that a Gringo Huertista spy was among us, I decided to go to bed. But the baile kept up until seven....

CHAPTER VI

"QUIEN VIVE?"

At dawn I woke to the sound of shooting, and a cracked bugle blowing wildly. Juan Sanchez stood in front of the cuartel, sounding Reveille; he didn't know which call Reveille was, so he played them all.

Patricio had roped a steer for breakfast. The animal started on a plunging, bellowing run for the desert, Patricio's horse galloping alongside. The rest of the Tropa, only their eyes showing over their serapes, kneeled with their rifles to their shoulders. Crash! In that still air, the enormous sound of guns labored heavily up. The running steer jerked sideways,—his screaming reached us faintly. Crash! He fell headlong. His feet kicked in the air. Patricio's pony jerked roughly up, and his serape flapped like a banner. Just then the enormous sun rose bodily out of the east, pouring clear light over the barren plain like a sea....

Pablo emerged from the Casa Grande, leaning on his wife's shoulder.

"I am going to be very ill," he groaned, suiting the action to the word. "Juan Reed will ride my horse."

He got into the coach, weakly took the guitar, and sang:

"I remained at the foot of a green maguey

My ungrateful love went away with another.

I awoke to the song of the lark:

Oh, what a hangover I have, and the barkeeps won't trust me!

"O God, take away this sickness,

I feel as if I were surely going to die—

The Virgin of pulque and whisky must save me:

O what a hangover, and nothing to drink!..."

It is some sixty-five miles from La Zarca to the Hacienda of La Cadena, where the Tropa was to be stationed. We rode it in one day, without water and without food. The coach soon left us far behind. Pretty soon, the barrenness of the land gave way to spiny, hostile vegetation,—the cactus and the mesquite. We strung out along a deep rut between the gigantic chaparral, choked with the mighty cloud of alkali dust, scratched and torn by the thorny brush. Sometimes emerging in an open space, we could see the straight road climbing the summits of the rolling desert, until the eye couldn't follow it; but we knew it must be there, still farther and farther again. Not a breath of wind stirred. The vertical sun beat down with a fury that made one reel. And most of the troop, who had been drunk the night before, began to suffer terribly. Their lips glazed, cracked, turned dark blue. I didn't hear a single word of complaint; but there was nothing of the lighthearted joking and rollicking of other days. José Valiente taught me how to chew mesquite twigs, but that didn't help much.

When we had been riding for hours, Fidencio pointed ahead, saying huskily: "Here comes a christiano!" When you realize that word christiano, which now means simply Man, is descended among the Indians from immeasurable antiquity,—and when the man that says it looks exactly as Guatemozin might have looked, it gives you curious sensations. The christiano in question was a very aged Indian driving a burro. No, he said, he didn't carry any water. But Sabas leaped from his horse and tumbled the old man's pack on the ground.

"Ah!" he cried; "fine! Tres piedras!" and held up a root of the sotol plant, which looks like a varnished century-plant, and oozes with intoxicating juices. We divided it as you divide an artichoke. Pretty soon everybody felt better....

It was at the end of the afternoon that we rounded a shoulder of the desert and saw ahead the gigantic ashen alamo trees that surrounded the spring of the Hacienda of Santo Domingo. A pillar of brown dust, like the smoke of a burning city, rose from the corral, where vaqueros were roping horses. Desolate and alone stood the Casa Grande, burned by Che Che Campa a year ago. And by the spring, at the foot of the alamo trees, a dozen wandering peddlers squatted around their fire, their burros munching corn. From the fountain to the adobe houses and back moved an endless chain of women water-carriers,—the symbol of northern Mexico.

"Water!" we shouted, joyously, galloping down the hill. The coach-horses were already at the spring with Patricio. Leaping from their saddles, the Tropa threw themselves on their bellies. Men and horses indiscriminately thrust in their heads, and drank and drank.... It was the most glorious sensation I have ever felt.

"Who has a cigarro?" cried somebody. For a few blessed minutes we lay on our backs smoking. The sound of music—gay music—made me sit up. And there, across my vision, moved the strangest procession in the world. First came a ragged peon carrying the flowering branch of some tree. Behind him, another bore upon his head a little box that looked like a coffin, painted in broad strips of blue, pink and silver. There followed four men, carrying a sort of canopy made of gay-colored bunting. A woman walked beneath it, though the canopy hid her down to the waist; but on top lay the body of a little girl, with bare feet and little brown hands crossed on her breast. There was a wreath of paper flowers in her hair, and her whole body was heaped with them. A harpist brought up the rear, playing a popular waltz called "Recuerdos de Durango." The funeral procession moved slowly and gaily along, passing the ribota court, where the players never ceased their handball game, to the little Campo Santo. "Bah!" spat Julian Reyes furiously. "That is a blasphemy to the dead!"

In the late sunshine the desert was a glowing thing. We rode in a silent, enchanted land, that seemed some kingdom under the sea. All around were great cactuses colored red, blue, purple, yellow, as coral is on the ocean bed. Behind us, to the west, the coach rolled along in a glory of dust like Elijah's chariot.... Eastward, under a sky already darkening to stars, were the rumpled mountains behind which lay La Cadena, the advance post of the Maderista army. It was a land to love—this Mexico—a land to fight for. The ballad-singers suddenly began the interminable song of "The Bull-Fight," in which the Federal chiefs are the bulls, and the Maderista generals the torreros; and as I looked at the gay, lovable, humble hombres who had given so much of their lives and of their comfort to the brave fight, I couldn't help but think of the little speech Villa made to the foreigners who left Chihuahua in the first refugee train:

"This is the latest news for you to take to your people. There shall be no more palaces in Mexico. The tortillas of the poor are better than the bread of the rich. Come!..."

It was late night—past eleven—when the coach broke down on a stretch of rocky road between high mountains. I stopped to get my blankets; and when I started on again, the compañeros had long vanished down the winding road. Somewhere near, I knew, was La Cadena. At any minute now a sentinel might start up out of the chaparral. For about a mile I descended a steep road that was often the dried bed of a river, winding down between high mountains. It was a black night, without stars, and bitter cold. Finally, the mountains opened into a vast plain, and across that I could faintly see the tremendous range of the Cadena, and the pass that the Tropa was to guard. Barely three leagues beyond that pass lay Mapimi, held by twelve hundred Federals. But the hacienda was still hidden by a roll of the desert.

I was quite upon it, without being challenged, before I saw it, an indistinct white square of buildings on the other side of a deep arroyo. And still no sentinel. "That's funny," I said to myself. "They don't keep very good watch here." I plunged down into the arroyo, and climbed up the other side. In one of the great rooms of the Casa Grande were lights and music. Peering through, I saw the indefatigable Sabas whirling in the mazes of the jota, and Isidro Amayo, and José Valiente. A baile! Just then a man with a gun lounged out of the lighted doorway.

"Quien vive?" he shouted, lazily.

"Madero!" I shouted.

"May he live!" returned the sentinel, and went back to the baile....

CHAPTER VII

AN OUTPOST OF THE REVOLUTION

There were a hundred and fifty of us stationed at La Cadena, the advance guard of all the Maderista army to the West. Our business was to guard a pass, the Puerta de la Cadena; but the troops were quartered at the hacienda, ten miles away. It stood upon a little plateau, a deep arroyo on one side, at the bottom of which a sunken river came to the surface for perhaps a hundred yards, and vanished again. As far as the eye could reach up and down the broad valley was the fiercest kind of desert,—dried creek-beds, and a thicket of chaparral, cactus and sword plant.

Directly east lay the Puerta, breaking the tremendous mountain range that blotted out half the sky and extended north and south beyond vision, wrinkled like a giant's bed-clothes. The desert tilted up to meet the gap, and beyond was nothing but the fierce blue of stainless Mexican sky. From the Puerta you could see fifty miles across the vast arid plain that the Spaniards named Llano de los Gigantes, where the little mountains lie tumbled about; and four leagues away the low gray houses of Mapimi. There lay the enemy; twelve hundred colorados, or Federal irregulars, under the infamous Colonel Argumendo. The colorados are the bandits that made Orozco's revolution. They were so called because their flag was red, and because their hands were red with slaughter, too. They swept through Northern Mexico, burning, pillaging and robbing the poor. In Chihuahua, they cut the soles from the feet of one poor devil, and drove him a mile across the desert before he died. And I have seen a city of four thousand souls reduced to five after a visit by the colorados. When Villa took Torreon, there was no mercy for the colorados; they are always shot.

The first day we reached La Cadena, twelve of them rode up to reconnoiter. Twenty-five of the Tropa were on guard at the Fuerta. They captured one colorado. They made him get off his horse, and took away his rifle, clothes and shoes. THen they made him run naked through a hundred yards of chaparral and cactus, shooting at him. Juan Sanchez finally dropped him, screaming, and thereby won the rifle, which he brought back as a present to me. The colorado they left to the great Mexican buzzards, which flap lazily above the desert all day long.

When all this happened, my compadre, Captain Longinos Güereca, and Trooper Juan Vallejo, and I, had borrowed the Colonel's coach for a trip to the dusty little rancho of Bruquilla,—Longinos' home. It lay four desert leagues to the north, where a spring burst miraculously out of a little white hill. Old Güereca was a white-haired peon in sandals. He had been born a slave on one of the great haciendas; but years of toil, too appalling to realize, had made him that rare being in Mexico, the independent owner of a small property. He had ten children,—soft, dark-skinned girls, and sons that looked like New England farmhands,—and a daughter in the grave.

The Güerecas were proud, ambitious, warm-hearted folk. Longinos said: "This is my dearly loved friend, Juan Reed, and my brother." And the old man and his wife put both their arms around me and patted me on the back, in the affectionate way Mexicans embrace.

"My family owes nothing to the Revolucion," said 'Gino, proudly. "Others have taken money and horses and wagons. The jefes of the army have become rich from the property of the great haciendas. The Güerecas have given all to the Maderistas, and have taken nothing but my rank...."

The old man, however, was a little bitter. Holding up a horsehair rope, he said: "Three years ago I had four riatas like this. Now I have only one. One the colorados took, and the other Urbina's people took, and the last one José Bravo.... What difference does it make which side robs you?" But he didn't mean it all. He was immensely proud of his youngest son, the bravest officer in all the army.

We sat in the long adobe room, eating the most exquisite cheese, and tortillas with fresh goat-butter,—the deaf old mother apologizing in a loud voice for the poverty of the food, and her warlike son reciting his personal Iliad of the nine-days' fight around Torreon.

"We got so close," he was saying, "that the hot air and burning powder stung us in the face. We got too close to shoot, so we clubbed our rifles——" Just then all the dogs began to bark at once. We leaped from our seats. One didn't know what to expect in the Cadena those days. It was a small boy on horseback, shouting that the colorados were entering the Puerta—and off he galloped.

Longinos roared to put the mules in the coach. The entire family fell to work with a fury, and in five minutes Longinos dropped on one knee and kissed his father's hand, and we were tearing down the road. "Don't be killed! Don't be killed! Don't be killed!" we could hear the Señora wailing.

We passed a wagon loaded with corn-stalks, with a whole family of women and children, two tin trunks, and an iron bed, perched on top. The man of the family rode a burro. Yes, the colorados were coming—thousands of them pouring through the Puerta. The last time the colorados had come they had killed his daughter. For three years there had been war in this valley, and he had not complained. Because it was for the Patria. Now they would go to the United States where—— But Juan lashed the mules cruelly, and we heard no more. Farther along was an old man without shoes, placidly driving some goats. Had he heard about the colorados? Well, there had been some gossip about colorados. Were they coming through the Puerta, and how many?

"Pues, quien sabe, señor!"

At last, yelling at the staggering mules, we came into camp just in time to see the victorious Tropa straggle in across the desert, firing off many more rounds of ammunition than they had used in the fight. They moved low along the ground, scarcely higher on their broncos than the drab mesquite through which they flashed, all big sombreros and flapping gay serapes, the last sunshine on their lifted rifles.

That very night came a courier from General Urbina, saying that he was ill and wanted Pablo Seañes to come back. So off went the great coach, and Pablo's mistress, and Raphaelito, the hunchback, and Fidencio, and Patricio. Pablo said to me: "Juanito, if you want to come back with us, you shall sit beside me in the coach." Patricio and Raphaelito begged me to come. But I had got so far to the front now that I didn't want to turn back. Then the next day my friends and compañeros of the Tropa, whom I had learned to know so well in our march across the desert, received orders to move to Jarralitos. Only Juan Vallejo and Longinos Güereca stayed behind.

The Cadena's new garrison were a different kind of men. God knows where they came from, but it was a place where the troopers had literally starved. They were the most wretchedly poor peons that I have ever seen—about half of them didn't have serapes. Some fifty were known to be nuevos who had never smelt powder, about the same number were under a dreadfully incompetent old party named Major Salazar, and the remaining fifty were equipped with old carbines and ten rounds of ammunition apiece. Our commanding officer was Lieutenant-Colonel Petronilo Hernandez, who had been six years a Major in the Federal army until the murder of Madero drove him to the other side. He was a brave, good-hearted little man, with twisted shoulders, but years of official army red tape had unfitted him to handle troops like these. Every morning he issued an Order of the Day, distributing guards, posting sentinels, and naming the officer on duty. Nobody ever read it. Officers in that army have nothing to do with the disciplining or ordering of soldiers, They are officers because they have been brave, and their job is to fight at the head of their troop—that's all. The soldiers all look up to some one General, under whom they are recruited, as to their feudal lord. They call themselves his gente—his people; and an officer of anybody else's gente hasn't much authority over them. Petronilo was of Urbina's gente; but two-thirds of the Cadena garrison belonged to Arrieta's division. That's why there were no sentinels to the west and north. Lieutenant-Colonel Alberto Redondo guarded another pass four leagues to the south, so we thought we were safe in that direction. True, twenty-five men did outpost duty at the Fuerta, and the Puerta was strong....

CHAPTER VIII

THE FIVE MUSKETEERS

The Casa Grande of La Cadena had been sacked, of course, by Che Che Campa the year before. In the patio were corraled the officers' horses. We slept on the tiled floors of the rooms surrounding it. In the sala of the owner, once barbarically decorated, pegs were driven into the walls to hang saddles and bridles on, rifles and sabers were stacked against the wall, and dirty blanket-rolls lay flung into the corner. At night a fire of corn-cobs was built in the middle of the floor, and we squatted around it, while Apolinario and fourteen-year-old Gil Tomas, who was once a colorado, told stories of the Bloody Three Years.

"At the taking of Durango," said Apolinario, "I was of the gente of Captain Borunda; he that they call the Matador, because he always shoots his prisoners. But when Urbina took Durango there weren't many prisoners. So Borunda, thirsty for blood, made the rounds of all the saloons. And in every one he would pick out some unarmed man and ask him if he were a Federal. 'No, señor,' the man would say. 'You deserve death because you have not told the truth!' yelled Borunda, pulling his gun. Bang!"

We all laughed heartily at this.

"That reminds me," broke in Gil, "of the time I fought with Rojas in Orozco's—(cursed be his mother!)—Revolucion. An old Porfirista officer deserted to our side, and Orozco sent him out to teach the colorados (animals!) how to drill. There was one droll fellow in our company. Oh! he had a fine sense of humor. He pretended he was too stupid to learn the manual of arms. So this cursed old Huertista—(may he fry in hell!)—made him drill alone.

"'Shoulder arms!' The companero did it all right.

"'Present arms!' Perfectly.

"'Port arms!' He acted like he didn't know how, so the old fool went around and took hold of the rifle.

"'This way!' says he, pulling on it.

"'Oh!' says the fellow, 'that way!' And he let him have the bayonet right in the chest...."

After that Fernando Silveyra, the paymaster, recounted a few anecdotes of the curas, or priests, that sounded exactly like Touraine in the thirteenth century, or the feudal rights of landlords over their women tenants before the French Revolution. Fernando ought to have known, too, for he was brought up for the Church. There must have been about twenty of us sitting around that fire, all the way from the most miserably poor peon in the Tropa up to First Captain Longinos Güereca. There wasn't one of these men who had any religion at all, although once they had all been strict Catholics. But three years of war have taught the Mexican people many things. There will never be another Porfirio Diaz; there will never be another Orozco Revolution; and the Catholic Church in Mexico will never again be the voice of God.

Then Juan Santillanes, a twenty-two-year-old subteniente, who seriously informed me that he was descended from the great Spanish hero, Gil Blas, piped up the ancient disreputable ditty, which begins:

"I am Count Oliveros

Of the Spanish artillery...."

Juan proudly displayed four bullet wounds. He had killed a few defenseless prisoners with his own gun, he said; giving promise of growing up to be muy matador (a great killer) some day. He boasted of being the strongest and bravest man in the army. His idea of humor seemed to be breaking eggs into the pocket of my coat. Juan was very young for his years, but very likable.

But the best friend I had beside 'Gino Güereca was Subteniente Luis Martinez. They called him "Gachupine"—the contemptuous name for Spaniards—because he might have stepped out of a portrait of some noble Spanish youth by Greco. Luis was pure race—sensitive, gay and high-spirited. He was only twenty, and had never been in battle. Around the contour of his face was a faint black beard.

He fingered it, grinning. "Nicanor and I made a bet that we wouldn't shave until we took Torreon...."

Luis and I slept in different rooms. But at night, when the fire had gone out and the rest of the fellows were snoring, we sat at each other's blankets—one night in his cuartel, the one next to mine—talking about the world, our girls, and what we were going to be and to do when we really got at it. When the war was over, Luis was coming to the United States to visit me; and then we were both coming back to Durango City to visit the Martinez family. He showed me the photograph of a little baby, proudly boasting that he was an uncle already. "What will you do when the bullets begin to fly?" I asked him.