Page:Barbarous Mexico.djvu/117

Rh coming down in torrents. In a few hours the temperature must have dropped forty degrees.

One-third of the laborers here were women, one of them a girl of twelve. That night the buildings rocked so fearfully that the horses were taken out of the barn. But, though a building had blown down a few weeks previously, the slaves were not taken out of their jail. Their jail was built just off the dining-room of the dwelling and that night my companion and I slept in the dining-room. I heard the jail door open and shut for a late worker to enter and then I heard the voice of the twelve-year-old girl pleading in terror: "Please don't lock the door tonight—only tonight! Please leave it so we can be saved if the house falls!" The answer that I heard was only a brutal laugh.

When I went to bed that night at 9:30 a gang of slaves was still working about the barn. When I awoke at four the slaves were receiving their beans and tortillas in the slave kitchen. When I went to bed two of the Presidente's kitchen drudges were hard at work. Through the chinks in the poles which divided the two rooms I watched them, for I could not sleep. At eleven o'clock by my watch one disappeared. It was 12:05 before the other was gone, but in less than four hours more I saw her again, working, working, working, working!

Yet perhaps she fared better than did the grinders of corn and the drawers of water, for when, with the son of the Presidente, I visited the slave kitchen at five and remarked on the exhausted faces of the women there, he informed me that their rising hour was two o'clock and that they never had time to rest during the day!

Oh, it was awful! This boy of sixteen, manager of the farm in his father's absence, told me with much gusto of