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Updated: June 11, 2025
This was, however, exaggeration. I had no reason to complain of anything else during the time I was in Spain. "You ought," they said, "to have given a few pesetas to the guard of the diligencia, who would have taken charge of your cloth, and kept it from going through the custom-house."
Floating on the wind came the sound, as from another world, of shouting, and the hollow rumble of wheels. The holy man peered down into the valley, and soon verified his fears. It was the diligencia, which had quitted the monastery a short hour ago, that flew down the hill to inevitable destruction.
The shouts dimly heard at the monastery had the effect they were intended to create, for the monk could see the carters and muleteers draw aside to let the living avalanche go past. There were but two men on the box-seat of the diligencia the driver and a passenger seated by his side.
The adobe houses were cracked by the incessant sunshine of the half-year-long summer, or the more intermittent earthquake shock; the paved courtyard of the fonda was so uneven and sunken in the center that the lumbering wagon and faded diligencia stood on an incline, and the mules with difficulty kept their footing while being unladen; the whitened plaster had fallen from the feet of the two pillars that flanked the Mission doorway, like bandages from a gouty limb, leaving the reddish core of adobe visible; there were apparently as many broken tiles in the streets and alleys as there were on the heavy red roofs that everywhere asserted themselves and even seemed to slide down the crumbling walls to the ground.
The muslin bars which surround the beds of the Hotel Diligencia, fronting the plaza, are effectual, so that one can generally sleep during the two or three nights that he is likely to stay in the city. A longer sojourn is simply inviting disease, besides which there is no possible attraction to keep one here any longer.
One of the leaders swung right out in mid-air with flying legs, and mules and diligencia rolled over and over down the steep in a cloud of dust and stones. When Matthew S. Whittaker recovered consciousness, he found himself in a richly furnished bedroom.
We started from Vera Cruz about mid-day and slept, or rather passed the night, at a filthy inn alive with every sort of insect pest. Two hours before dawn we were bundled into the diligencia and slowly dragged up a mountain road so steep that, notwithstanding the blows and oaths of the drivers, the mules had to stop every few hundred yards to rest.
Two mornings later the Mexican National Express dropped us at the Lampasos depot about daylight, from which we made our way over a mile of dusty road winding through mesquite thickets to the Hotel Diligencia, on the main plaza. A norther was blowing that chilled us to the marrow, and of course, according to usual Mexican custom, not a room in the hotel was heated.
"How did you come to be here?" "Escaped from the basement of the hotel. I knew it was up to me to get through to you if I could live through the storm of bullets that I knew would be sent after me. My news is of the utmost importance!" Then, to the astounded American Navy officers the stranger made this blood-stirring announcement: "In the Hotel Diligencia are at least twenty American women!"
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