Page:Barbarous Mexico.djvu/62

50 opportunity to visit this unclean hole, but, luckily, we were mistaken. The guard bent readily to friendly words, and before the ship was well under way my companion and I were seated on boxes in the hold with a group of exiles gathered about us, some of them, tobacco-famished, pulling furiously at the cigarettes which we had passed among them, others silently munching the bananas, apples and oranges which we had brought.

There were two old men past fifty, one of them small, active, sharp-featured, talkative, dressed in American overalls, jumper, shoes and slouch hat, with the face and manner of a man bred to civilization; the other, tall, silent, impassive, wrapped to the chin in a gay colored blanket, the one comfort he had snatched from his few belongings as the soldiers were leading him away. There was a magnificent specimen of an athlete under thirty, with a wizened baby girl of two held in the crook of one arm, an aggressive-faced woman of forty against whom was closely pressed a girl of ten shivering and shaking in the grasp of a malarial attack, two overgrown boys who squatted together in the background and grinned half foolishly at our questions, bedraggled women, nearly half of them with babies, and an astonishingly large number of little chubby-faced, bare-legged boys and girls who played uncomprehendingly about the floor or stared at us from a distance out of their big solemn black eyes.

"Revolutionists?" I asked of the man in overalls and jumper.

"No; workingmen."

"Yaquis?"

"Yes, one Yaqui," pointing to his friend in the blanket. "The rest are Pimas and Opatas."