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Day after day she scaled the ranges with Kut-le and Alchise; tenderly reared creature of an ultracivilization as she was, she learned the intricate lore of the aborigines, learned what students of the dying people would give their hearts to know. Kut-le wakened Rhoda at dawn one day. She prepared the breakfast of coffee, bacon and tortilla.
When the whistle blew at seven next morning, some forty peons, who had straggled one by one in the dawn to huddle up together in their red sarapes among the rocks of the drab hillside, marched past the timekeeper, turning over their blankets at a check counter, and with their lunches, of the size of the round tortilla at the bottom and four to six inches high, in their handkerchiefs, climbed into the six-foot, iron ore-bucket until it was completely roofed with their immense straw hats.
He said that all the houses were empty, and, if perchance one were occupied, no one would turn out so late to supply us. All were extremely hungry, as we had eaten nothing since morning except a tortilla or two with some eggs as we rode along. Manuel, Louis and Frank slept in the loft, Ramon and I upon the floor below. The two mozos with the saddles slept in the other hut.
An old woman of La Libertad, a collection of mud huts wedged into a little plain between jungled mountain-sides, answered my hungry query with a cheery "Como no!" and in due time set before me black beans and blacker coffee and a Honduranean tortilla, which are several times thicker and heavier than those of Mexico and taste not unlike a plank of dough.
They were built so purposely, since they must serve for fortresses as well as homes. Hopi Wafer. Bread. One is often likely to find a woman engaged in making piki. Piki is a wafer bread, peculiar to the Hopis. It is finer than the finest tortilla of the Mexican, or oatcake of the Scotch. No biscuit maker in America or England can make a cracker one-half so thin.
For my own part, I set about comforting my mule, who had been under saddle since leaving Rivas. I unsaddled him, brought him an armful of tortilla corn from the alcalde's kitchen-loft, some water from the well, and left him making merry as if he had nothing worse ahead of him.
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