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52 soldiers came. Then they knew, and they saw ruin coming to them as well as to us. They begged the officers, saying: 'This is my peon. He is a good man. He has been with me for twenty years. I need him for the harvest.'"

"It is true," broke in the woman with the ague-stricken child. "We were with Carlos Romo for twenty-two years. The night we were taken we were seven; now we are two."

"And we were with Eugenio Morales for sixteen years," spoke another woman.

"Yes," went on the spokesman, "our bosses followed us, begging, but it was no use. Some of them followed us all the way to Hermosillo. There was Manuel Gandara, and Jose Juan Lopez, and Franco Tallez, and Eugenio Morales and the Romo brothers, Jose and Carlos. You will find them there now and they will tell you that what we say is true. They followed us, but it was no use. They had to go back and call vainly at our empty houses for laborers. We were stolen—and they were robbed!

"They died on the way like starving cattle," went on the old man from Ures. "When one fell ill he never got well again. One woman was deathly sick at the start. She begged to be left behind, but they wouldn't leave her. She was the first to fall—it happened on the train between Hermosillo and Guaymas.

"But the crudest part of the trail was between San Blas and San Marcos. Those women with babies! It was awful! They dropped down in the dust again and again. Two never got up again, and we buried them ourselves there beside the road."

"There were burros in San Blas," interrupted a woman, "and mules and horses. Oh, why didn't they