about town until he had picked up the jefe politico, a handsome Mexican,
built as massive as an Aztec stone idol, under a veritable haystack of
hat, who ostensibly at least was a sworn friend of the mining
company. With him we returned to the deafening stamp-mill and brought up
in the "zinc room," where the metal is cast into bricks. Here the
stealing of ore by workmen is particularly prevalent, and even the
searching by the trusty at the gate not entirely effective, for even the
skimming off of the scum leaves the floor scattered with chips of silver
with a high percentage of gold which even the American in charge cannot
always keep the men from concealing. Hence there occurs periodically the
scene we were about to witness.

When the native workmen of the "zinc room" enter for the day, they are
obliged to strip in one chamber and pass on to the next to put on their
working clothes, reversing the process when they leave. To-day all five
of them were herded together in one dressing-room, of which, the three
of us being admitted, the door was locked. The jefe politico, as the
government authority of the region, set about searching them, and as his
position depended on the good-will of the powerful mining company, it
was no perfunctory "frisking." The ragged fellows were called up one by
one and ordered to strip of blouses, shirts, and trousers, and even
_huarachas_, their flat leather sandals, the jefe examining
carefully even the seams of their garments. Indeed, he even searched the
hairs of their bodies for filings of "high-grade."

The men obeyed with dog-like alacrity, though three of them showed some
inner emotion, whether of guilt, fear, or shame, it was hard to
guess. Two had been carefully gone over without the discovery of
anything incriminating, when the jefe suddenly snatched up the hat of
the first and found in it a knotted handkerchief containing a scrap of