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Mr Stephens, in his Travels in Yucatan, shows how wives are taken and treated in the New World. "When the Indian grows up to manhood, he requires a woman to make him tortillas, and to provide him warm water for his bath at night.
Then he lay down upon the bed, drew a blanket over him because the night was chill in the City of Mexico, and calmly sought sleep. The optimism of Mr. Austin endured the next morning, but Ned was gloomy. Since it was his habit to be silent, the man did not notice it at first. The breakfast was good, with tortillas, frijoles, other Mexican dishes and coffee, but the boy had no appetite.
"Si," he said. "But not a whole lot of time," asserted Andy. The Indian rose and fetched a pail of goat's milk and some tortillas from the shack. He shuffled back to his hermitage and reappeared with a tin cup. Andy, who meanwhile had consumed one leathery tortilla, shook his head. "Never mind the cup, amigo." He tilted the pail and drank paused for breath, and drank again.
"Yonder is good water and I have tortillas and frijoles." Unshaven and dirty, gaunt from lack of sleep, the three men dismounted wearily and gladly turned their coffee and bacon over to the herder to whom the mere odor of either was worth any amount of service. As they ate, Jack and Billy quizzed the Mexican as to the topography of the surrounding country. The little herder was a canny chap.
Her enchiladas, seasoned with cheese and onions, were the best we ever had, and after the first experience, we insisted on having them at every meal. Her masterpieces were in simple maize. Her tortillas were good, but tortillas one finds everywhere; she served cocoles, chavacanes, and pemol.
We took a plunge in the stream, and after a breakfast of coffee and cold tortillas climbed into the saddle and again picked up the trail. After riding for an hour Aiken warned me that at any moment we were likely to come upon either Laguerre or the soldiers of Alvarez. "So you keep your eyes and ears open," he said, "and when they challenge throw up your hands quick.
Doña Teresa gave them two tortillas apiece, rolled up with beans inside, to eat at recess, and Tonio wrapped them in a cloth and carried them in his hat just the way Pancho carried his lunch, only there was no chile sauce, this time. Doña Teresa waved good-bye to them from the trough where she was grinding her corn.
There were peanuts, narrow strips of cocoanut, plantains, bananas short and fat, sickly little apples, dwarf peaches, small wild grapes, oranges green in color, potatoes often no larger than marbles, as if the possessor could not wait until they grew up before digging them; cactus leaves, the spines shaved off, cut up into tiny squares to serve as food; bundles of larger cactus spines brought in by hobbling old women or on dismal asses and sold as fuel, aguacates, known to us as "alligator pears" and tasting to the uninitiated like axle-grease; pomegranates, pecans, cheeses flat and white, every species of basket and earthen jar from two-inch size up, turnips, some cut in two for those who could not afford a whole one; onions, flat slabs of brown, muddy-looking soap, rice, every species of frijole, or bean, shelled corn for tortillas, tomatoes tomate coloradito, though many were tiny and green as if also prematurely gathered peppers red and green, green-corn with most of the kernels blue, lettuce, radishes, cucumbers, carrots, cabbages, melons of every size except large, string-beans, six-inch cones of the muddiest of sugar, the first rough product of the crushers wound in swamp grass and which prospective purchasers handled over and over, testing them now and then by biting off a small corner, though there was no apparent difference; sausages with links of marble size, everything in the way of meat, tossed about in the dirt, swarming with flies, handled, smelled, cut into tiny bits for purchasers; even strips of intestines, the jaw-bone of a sheep with barely the smell of meat on it; all had value to this gaunt community, nothing was too green, or old, or rotten to be offered for sale.
Two hours' riding around the lagoon furnishing water for irrigation brought us to a village of some size, belonging to the estate. The wife of one of the bee-tenders emerged from her hut with bowls of clear rich honey and tortillas, and the manner of a serf of medieval times before her feudal lord. The bees lived in hollow logs with little thatched roofs.
"There are tortillas to be had sometimes," the servant answered. "Also, sometimes, frijoles." "They both sound good," Harry assented vaguely. "Bring us some." "Caballeros, you shall be served with the speed at which the eagle flies!" exclaimed the servant. With a separate bow to each he withdrew, softly closing the door after him. "Now Harry, let's hustle into some clothes," urged Tom.
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