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Soon I came upon the vanguard of the day-shift from "Pingueico," straggling down the face of the mountain, shouting and whistling to each other in their peculiar language. Some carried torches that flashed along the mountain wall above me and threw long quaint shadows of the tight-trousered legs. The grade was more than forty-five degrees, with much slipping and sliding on unseen rocks.
Miners' wages vary much throughout Mexico, from twelve dollars a month to two a day in places no insuperable distances apart. Conditions also differ greatly, according to my experienced compatriots. The striking and booting of the workmen, common in some mines, was never permitted in "Pingueico."
From the town we could see plainly the city of Leon, fourth in Mexico, and a view of the plain, less striking than that from "Pingueico," because of the range rising to cut it off in the middle distance. The mountains of all this region are dotted with round, white, cement monuments, the boundary marks of different mining properties.
The director complained that the recent revolutions had set the school far back, as each government left it to the next to provide for such secondary necessities. A classmate of my boyhood was superintendent of the group of mines round about Guanajuato. From among them we chose "Pingueico" for my temporary employment.
A blaze crackling in the fireplace was pleasant during the evening in the manager's house, for "Peregrina" lies even higher above the sea than "Pingueico"; but even here by night or day the peons, and especially the women, went barefoot and in thinnest garb.
Through it all it was raining much of the time in torrents in the mine, that is, for outside the sun was shining brightly with mud underfoot and streams of water running along much of the way; and, unlike the sweltering interior of "Pingueico," there was a dank dungeon chill that reached the marrow of the bones.
Once given a position of authority, they were harsher with their own kind than were the white men. The scarred and seared old "Pingueico" searcher, who stood at his block three times each twenty-four hours, had already killed three men who thus attacked him. Under no provocation whatever would the peons fight underground, but lay for their enemies only outside.
Let the dynamo here break down and the cage of "Pingueico" mine hangs suspended in its shaft and Stygian darkness falls in the labyrinth below. In the rainy season lightning causes much trouble, and immense flocks of birds migrating south or north, according to the period of year, keep the repair gangs busy by flying against the wires and causing short circuits through their dead bodies.
They were no doubt more "aficionados al pulque" and gambling than to their families, but so to some extent were the "gringoes" also, and they were by no means the only human beings who would succumb to the same temptation under the same circumstances. The ancient "Peregrina" mine was different from "Pingueico."
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