Page:Popular medicine, customs and superstitions of the Rio Grande, John G. Bourke, 1894.pdf/27

Rh of kitchen botany, the black art, humbuggery pure and simple, and a familiarity with just enough prayers and litanies to give a specious varnish to the more objectionable features of their profession. The "curandera" responded promptly, and made her diagnosis almost with a glance of the eye.

"Your son," she said to the grief-stricken mother, "has neither consumption nor paralysis. The doctors can't tell what ails him, but I can see it all, and with the power of God can soon make him well again."

"What is the matter with him, then, my dear little friend?" "Black Thomas cats. When I came into the room, the floor was a foot deep with Thomas cats which had jumped out of your son's throat, but they became frightened when they saw me and scampered back again. I'll soon get rid of them all."

Her intentions may have been good, but she got rid of nothing. Her "remedios" produced no effect, and the patient kept on sinking.

Just then a rival "curandera" came up to the mother and said: "That woman is deceiving you. She don't know what she's talking about. Why your son never has been troubled by Thomas cats—but I can tell you at once what ails him."

"Tell me, then, in the name of God."

"It is bull-frogs. I can see them jumping over each other and running into and out from his mouth."

To make a long story short, the first "curandera" would not give up the case, but insisted on holding on to what, in the language of to-day, would be called a decidedly soft snap, and the town, as is usual in such cases, taking up a quarrel in which it did n't have the slightest interest, became divided into the two bitterly hostile factions of the "bull-froggers" and the "Thomas-catters." The street became blocked with a crowd of partisans and excitement ran high. Judge Stewart surrounded the whole gang and had them run down to court, where he dismissed all but the ten "curanderas" (for there were ten altogether), who were loudly proclaiming their influence with witches.

"Have you ever seen any witches?" he asked of the first.

"Oh yes, indeed, many times. Why only last Wednesday, the witches picked me up at midnight and took me out on the Corpus Christi road, and up above the clouds, where they played pelota (football) with me, and when they got tired of that, they dropped me into a mesquite thicket, and here you see my clothes all torn to rags to prove that I am telling the truth."

The next one said she could get into any house, no matter whether the doors were open or shut.