Page:Barbarous Mexico.djvu/75

Rh the weight of a club. But our majocol never faltered. That majocol is a genius. He conquered the wolf. He wielded the rope until the stubborn one surrendered, until that same Yaqui came crawling, whimpering, on hands and knees and licked with his naked tongue the hand of the man who had beaten him!"

During my travels in Yucatan I was repeatedly struck with the extremely human character of the people whom the Mexican government calls Yaquis. The Yaquis are Indians, they are not white, yet when one converses with them in a language mutually understood one is struck with the likenesses of the mental processes of White and Brown. I was early convinced that the Yaqui and I were more alike in mind than in color. I became convinced, too, that the family attachments of the Yaqui mean quite as much to the Yaqui as the family attachments of the American mean to the American. Conjugal fidelity is the cardinal virtue of the Yaqui home and it seems to be so not because of any tribal superstition of past times or because of any teachings of priests, but because of a constitutional tenderness sweetened more and more with the passing of the years, for the one with whom he had shared the meat and the shelter and the labor of life, the joys and sorrows of existence.

Over and over again I saw this exemplified on the exile road and in Yucatan. The Yaqui woman feels as keenly the brutal snatching away of her babe as would the cultivated American woman. The heart-strings of the Yaqui wife are no more proof against a violent and unwished-for separation from her husband than would be the heart-strings of the refined mistress of a beautiful American home.

The Mexican government forbids divorce and