Page:Barbarous Mexico.djvu/105

Rh shoes again, and before I went to bed I heard him trying to sell them to a passer-by for twenty-five cents.

Wherever we stopped we induced people, by careless questions, to talk about the valley. I wanted to make no mistake. I wanted to hear the opinion of everybody. I did not know what might be denied us farther on. And always the story was the same—slavery and men and women beaten to death.

We arose at five the next morning and missed our breakfast in order to follow the slave gang over the road to Valle Nacional. At first the chief of the two rurales, a clean, handsome young Mexican, looked askance at our presence, but before we were half way there he was talking pleasantly. He was a Tuztepec rurale and was making his living out of the system, yet he was against it.

"It's the Spanish who beat our people to death," he said bitterly. "All the tobacco planters are Spanish, all but one or two."

The rurale chief gave us the names of two Spaniards, partners, Juan Pereda and Juan Robles, who had become rich on Valle Nacional tobacco and had sold out and gone back to spend the rest of their days in Spain. After they were gone, said he, the new owner, in looking over the place, ran upon a swamp in which he found hundreds of human skeletons. The toilers whom Pereda and Robles had starved and beaten to death they had been too miserly to bury.

Nobody ever thought of having a planter arrested for murdering his slaves, the ‘‘rurale’’ told us. To this rule he mentioned two exceptions; one. the case of a foreman who had shot three slaves; the other, a case in which an American figured and in which the American ambassador took action. In the first case the planter had disapproved