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Updated: June 28, 2025
Now and then noisy boisterous bands of natives passed along the trail from their Christmas festivities in the town ahead. But whereas a Mexican highway at this hour would have been overrun with drunken peons more or less dangerous to "gringoes," drink seemed to have made these chiefly amorous. Still I took good care to arrange myself for the night quietly, if only to be able to sleep undisturbed.
"We'll tell Brent that everything is all right," he said easily. "But he's a dam' liar," he added in an undertone to Pete. Brevoort had made the mistake of assuming that because he did not understand Mexican, Arguilla did not understand English. Arguilla did not hear all that Brevoort said, but he caught the one significant word. His broad face darkened. These Gringoes knew too much!
"But how in thunderation ?" began Pete, as they rode forward. "We'll tell you some other time," broke in Jack. "The main thing now is to get away from here, for I've a notion that in no very short time it's going to be mighty unhealthy for gringoes." "Guess you're right, lad. How're yer makin' out, perfusser?"
The old man bragged triumphantly of the new acquisition, urging his son-in-law also to rejoice. "A very useful fellow, isn't he? . . . These gringoes from Germany work well, know a good many things and cost little. Then, too, so disciplined! so servile! . . . I am sorry to praise him so to you because you are a Frenchy, and your nation has in them a very powerful enemy.
He insists that he comes of a great family, but who knows anything about these gringoes? . . . All of us, dead with hunger when we reach America, claim to be sons of princes." Madariaga had placed himself on a familiar footing with his Teutonic treasure, not through gratitude as with Desnoyers, but in order to make him feel his inferiority.
Twenty-one years ago he had worked here as mozo for "gringoes," my compatriots. They had offered him a whole peso a day if he would not get married. But "he and she both wanted," so "que quiera uste'"? They had started farming on a little piece of rocky ridge. He would point it out to me when we came nearer.
Peon soldiers, drowsing in the sun or clustering around the cantinas, stared stupidly at them as they flashed past. Then a drunken major shouted a challenge from the doorway of a cantina and began vociferating orders, and as they left the plaza behind they could hear rising the familiar mob-cry "Kill the Gringoes!"
Did this noble captain of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity rush to the rescue of his countrymen? He did not. Cursing, he swung his horse toward the south, followed by his amazed and altogether uncomprehending soldiery. There had been too many Gringoes in that wild, shrilling cavalcade to suit his fancy.
"Every one of these gringoes when he is a clerk at the Capital sweeps the shop, prepares the meals, keeps the books, sells to the customers, works the typewriter, translates four or five languages, and dances attendance on the proprietor's lady friend, as though she were a grand senora . . . all for twenty-five dollars a month. Who can compete with such people!
A natural amphitheater encloses the ball-ground in which were gathered the wives of Americans, in snowy white, to watch a game between teams made up chiefly of "gringoes" of the mines, my one-time classmate still at short-stop, as in our schoolboy days, thanks to which no doubt Guanajuato held the baseball championship of Mexico.
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