the eastward. For road in Mexico always read--at best a winding stretch
of dried mud with narrow paths meandering through the smoother parts of
it, the whole tumbled everywhere with stones and rocks and broken by
frequent unexpected deep cracks and stony gorges. My "horse" was as
striking a caricature of that species of quadruped as could have been
found in an all-night search in the region, which indeed there was
reason to believe had been produced in just that manner. But at least it
had the advantage of being unable to keep up with my companions, leaving
me alone behind in far more pleasant company.

We wound through several long peon villages, mere grass huts on the bare
earth floors of which the inhabitants lay rolled up in their blankets. I
had not been supplied with spurs, essential to all horsemanship in
Mexico, and was compelled at thirty second intervals to prick up the
jade between my legs with the point of a lead pencil, the only weapon at
hand, or be left behind entirely. As the stars dimmed and the horizon
ahead took on a thin gray streak, peons wrapped in their sarapes passed
now and then noiselessly in their soft leather _huarachas_ close
beside me. In huts along the way frowsy, unwashed women might be heard
already crushing in their stone mortars, under stone rolling-pins, maize
for the morning atole and tortillas, while thick smoke began to wander
lazily out from the low doorways. Swiftly it grew lighter until suddenly
an immense red sun leaped full-grown above the ragged horizon ahead,
just as we sighted an isolated station building in the wilderness that
now surrounded us on all sides.

A two-car train rambled through a light-wooded, half-mountainous
country, stopping at every collection of huts to pick up or set down a
peon or two, and drew up at length in Zamora. It was a populous,
flat-roofed, ill-smelling, typical Mexican city of checkerboard pattern,