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It was the reflection of our fire, to which l'Encuerado had just set a light. The piercing cold was excessively trying: our sarapés did not seem sufficient to protect us from its influence. Fortunately we had obtained fuel enough to keep up the bivouac fire all night. Our meal, although without meat, was a cheerful one.
As the stars dimmed and the horizon ahead took on a thin gray streak, peons wrapped in their sarapes passed now and then noiselessly in their soft leather huarachas close beside me.
Mexicans were there enveloped in their sarapes; Chinamen in their large-sleeved tunics, pointed shoes, and conical hats; one or two Kanucks from the coast; and even a sprinkling of Black Feet, Grosventres, or Flatheads, from the banks of the Trinity river. The scene is in San Francisco, the capital of California, but not at the period when the placer-mining fever was raging from 1849 to 1852.
The sky was blue, and the air was fresh, so I abandoned the idea of returning home. Night came on, a fine rain purified the air, and the damp earth breathed forth a wholesome fragrance. Overcome by fatigue, we wrapped ourselves up in our sarapés, and soon fell into a sound sleep. The next day, when I opened my eyes, the sun was shining brightly in a blue sky.
There was always a peculiar stillness over all the scene. Groups of sandaled mine peons wound noiselessly away, a few rods apart, along undulating trails, the red of their sarapes and the yellow of their immense hats giving the predominating hue. In the vast landscape was much green, though more gray of outcropping rocks.
Two men in gay sarapes, with guns and belts of huge cartridges, reached it at the same time, and we squatted together on the ground at an angle of the wall below the window and ate with much exchange of banter the food poked out to us. The two had come that morning from Guanajuato, whither I was bound, and were headed for Dolores.
When we arrived, a small side door apparently opened of itself, and we entered, passing through long vaulted passages, and up steep winding stairs, till we found ourselves in a small railed gallery looking down directly upon the church. The scene was curious. About one hundred and fifty men, enveloped in cloaks and sarapes, their faces entirely concealed, were assembled in the body of the church.
Groups of brownish-gray donkeys with loads on their backs passed me or crawled along far-away trails, followed by men in tight white trousers, their striped and gay-colored sarapes about their bodies and their huge hats atop. Over all was a Sunday stillness, broken only by the occasional bark of a distant dog or a cockcrow that was almost musical as it was borne by on the wind.
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.
They were ordered to tie ropes about the waists of the criminals and stood clutching these and the tails of the red sarapes, when the jefe interrupted some anecdote to shout the Spanish version of: "What in are you waiting for?"
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