Page:Travels in Mexico and life among the Mexicans.djvu/634

626 its influence, and corn and wheat were springing up wherever its trickling rills had penetrated. This section was the crossing place of the Apache trail from the Sierra Madre to the eastern plains, and throughout these fields we saw scattered circular adobe watch-houses, to which the laborers would retreat at the first note of alarm. The Apaches have not been seen here for a number of years, and will never probably come this way again; yet every hacienda has suffered from them, and one field was pointed out to us where twenty laborers had been killed in a single fight. Towards sunset, in the centre of the valley, we passed one hacienda where the Indian peons were all sitting on the flat roofs of their mud dwellings, a picture of which I was reminded later, when visiting the Pueblos of New Mexico. The peon wears only cotton drawers and a hat, perhaps sandals, and at night a shirt and sarape; in fact, the Indian of the Border differs but slightly in dress from his red brother of Yucatan and Southern Mexico.