Page:Our Neighbor-Mexico.djvu/147

Rh they robbers? Here is where they congregate. They look enough like them "to fill the bill," as they say out West. Well got up in light-brown leather trowsers, with silvered buttons and loops closely running up the sides, wide, gray felt sombreros, silver trappings on horses; they evidently need money and have not much. Will they make our littles into their mickle?

They turn out protectors rather than robbers, a mistake made often in this doubting world. They are a blessing in disguise. The road is dangerous a few leagues onward, and they are sent as an escort. Poor escort they prove, for they gallop on ahead, and that is the last we see of the gay riders.

The next hacienda, where the danger chiefly lies, is owned by the governor of the State of Hidalgo; and, it is said, by way of slander undoubtedly, that he lets the robbers pillage the coach along the line of his farm, if they will leave that alone. Even so, I remember it was correctly reported at a seminary where I once served, that a shrewd old farmer of the neighborhood was said to have kept his orchards untouched by leading the students, who had too much of the old Adam and Eve in them, to the choicest apple-trees in his neighbor's orchards. At any rate, his splendid orchard never seemed touched by that school frost, and the others often were. Whether the story of this governor or that farmer is true or not, quien sabe?

All I know is, that his place, like the other's orchard, is by far the finest in the country. The maguey plant stretches for miles in perfect order and beauty. Barley and wheat, and other crops green with youth, or yellow with age, spread out lovely to the eye. A rich, dark hollow of earth, circled by a darker if not richer rim of earth, five to eight miles across, a piece of landscape held in the hollow of your eye, if not the hollow of your hand, made a gem in centre and setting, such as one rarely sees, especially when the flashing Southern sun, pouring through a brisk and stimulating atmosphere, in this rare ether over eight thousand feet above the sea, made the gem yet more radiant and transparent. I well-nigh envied the governor his spot, robbers and pulqui included.