BarbarousMexico JOHN KENNETH TURNER

50 BARBAROUS MEXICO
opportunity to visit this unclean hole, but, luckily, we
were mistaken. The guard bent readily to friendly
words, and before the ship was well under way my
companion and I were seated on boxes in the hold with
a group of exiles gathered about us, some of them, tobacco-famished,
pulling furiously at the cigarettes which
we had passed among them, others silentl y munching the
bananas, apples and oranges which we had brought.
There were two old men past fifty, one of them small,
active, sharp-featured, talkative, dressed in American
overalls, jumper, shoes and slouch hat, with the face
and manner of a man bred to civilization; the other, tall,
silent, impassive, wrapped to the chin in a gay colored
blanket, the one comfort he had snatched from his few
belongings as the soldiers were leading him away. There
was a magnificent specimen of an athlete under thirty,
with a wizened baby girl of two held in the crook of one
arm, an aggressive-faced woman of forty against whom
was closely pressed a girl of ten shivering and shaking
in the grasp of a malarial attack, two overgrown boys
who squatted together in the background and grinned
half foolishly at our questions, bedraggled women,
nearly half of them with babies, and an astonishingly
large number of little chubby-faced, bare-legged boys
and girls who played uncomprehendingly about the floor
or stared at us from a distance out of their big solemn
black eyes.
"Revolutionists?" I asked of the man in overalls and
jumper.
"No; workingmen."
"Yaquis ?"
"Yes, one Yaqui." pointing to his friend in the blanket.
"The rest are Pimas and Opatas."