policemen in shoddy uniforms, armed with clubs and enormous revolvers
sticking out through their short coat-tails, at length appeared, of the
same class and seeming little less frightened than the prisoners. They
were ordered to tie ropes about the waists of the criminals and stood
clutching these and the tails of the red sarapes, when the jefe
interrupted some anecdote to shout the Spanish version of:

"What in ---- are you waiting for?"

They dodged as if he had thrown a brick, and hurried their prisoners
away to the cold, flea-ridden, stone calaboose of the town, where in all
probability they lay several months before their case was even called
up; while the manager and I ascended to his veranda and flower-grown
residence and sat down to a several course dinner served by a squad of
solemn servants. As in many another land, it pays to be a white man in
Mexico.

Stealing is rarely a virtue. But it was not hard to put oneself in the
place of these wretches and catch their point of view that made such
thievery justifiable. As they saw it, these foreigners had made them go
down into their own earth and dig out its treasures, paid them little
for their labors, and searched them whenever they left that they should
not keep even a little bit of it for themselves. Now they had made
their own people shut them up because they had picked up a few dollars'
worth of scraps left over from the great burro-loads of which, to their
notion, the hated "gringoes" were robbing them. Like the workingmen of
England, they were only "getting some of their own back." They were no
doubt more "aficionados al pulque" and gambling than to their families,
but so to some extent were the "gringoes" also, and they were by no
means the only human beings who would succumb to the same temptation