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86 school and send them here just for the sake of the fifty pesos!"

Of our ten friends from Pachuca, all had been arrested and put in jail, but not one had been taken before a judge. Two had been charged with owing money that they could not pay, one had been arrested when drunk, another had been drunk and had discharged a firearm into the air, the fifth had shouted too loudly on Independence Day, September 16th, another had attempted rape, the seventh had had a mild-mannered quarrel with another boy over the sale of a five-cent ring, two had been musicians in the army and had left one company and joined another without permission, and the tenth had been a clerk of rurales and had been sold for paying a friendly visit to the previous two while they were in jail serving out their sentence for desertion.

When we smiled our incredulity at the tale of the tenth prisoner and asked the chief rurale pointblank if it was true, he astonished us with his reply. Nodding his grizzled head he said in a low voice:

"It is true. Tomorrow may be my time. It is always the poor that suffer."

We would have looked upon the stories of these men as "fairy tales," but all of them were confirmed by one or the other of the guards. The case of the musicians interested us most. The older carried the forehead of a university professor. He was a cornet player and his name was Amado Godaniz. The younger was a boy of but eighteen, the boy who cried, a basso player named Felipe Gomez.

"They are sending us to our 'death—to our death," muttered Godaniz. "We will never get out of that hole alive." And all along the route, wherever we met him, he said the same thing, repeating over and over again: