Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/384

376 enter. They spoke nothing but Spanish, but their father, who had lived in New Orleans thirty years before, spoke not only his native tongue, but French, English, and Mexican, or Indian. His English was, to be sure, a little the worse for his past thirty years' silence, but he patched it up with a little French, and so we hobbled on. "Im speaks," said he, "ze French besser zan ze England,"—and so he did.

Don Felipe was a medico, or doctor, in a small way, and was in great demand. He had one sovereign remedy for all complaints, which was that of Doctor Sangrado. He would draw more blood, for less money, than any physician I ever met. An Indian woman came to be bled while we were waiting for the horses, and he drew from her a pint of blood, into a cup clotted with gore, and charged her only a real, or twelve cents.

It was said to be fifteen miles from town to the rancho where we were to pass the night, and we ought to have started at noon, but it was four o'clock when we did start. There is always a vast difference, in Mexico, between the time you should leave, and the time when you do leave, always. Don Felipe insisted on accompanying me to the rancho, leaving his lucrative practice—doctors always have "lucrative practices "—to the care of his daughters, who were left alone. He was a sad-faced, quiet man, with thoughtful eyes and grizzled beard,—a grave and courtly Mexican, whose sense of duty to a chance guest impelled him to climb the mountain with him.

Leaving town, the road winds through great fields planted with corn, and soon runs at the bottom of a deep barranca, or ravine, ploughed out by the torrents that sometimes descend from the mountains. Our peon led a horse with a pack-saddle, and Don Felipe, the guide, and myself had each a small, but wiry horse, half hidden beneath a great Mexican saddle with large boot stirrups, on the pommel of which was coiled a lariat.

As we ascended, we met cattle and sheep, tended by many children in ragged garments, and donkeys and horses dragging long sticks of timber on wooden wheels a foot or two in diameter. To pass these we had to ride up the steep banks and wait. As we reached the pine trees—which do not descend in a body