A cold and wind-swept hour, all stiffly up or down, brought me to Esperanza, near which I saw the first wheeled vehicle of Honduras, a contraption of solid wooden wheels behind gaunt little oxen identical with those of northwest Spain even to the excruciating scream of its greaseless axle. In the outskirts two ragged, hoof-footed soldiers sprang up from behind the bushes of a hillside and came down upon me, waving their muskets and screaming:
"A'onde va? D'onde viene? Have you a pass to go through our department?"
They did not ask to read it, perhaps for a reason, but permitted me to pass; to my relief, for the old woman had announced that smallpox was raging in her town of Yamaranguila and its people were not allowed to enter Esperanza. This proved to be a place of considerable size, of large huts scattered over a broad grassy plain in a sheltered valley, with perhaps five thousand inhabitants but not a touch of civilization. Crowds of boys and dirty ragged soldiers followed me, grinning and throwing salacious comments as I wandered from house to house trying to buy food. At a corner of the plaza the comandante called to me from his hut. I treated him with the haughty air of a superior, with frequent reference to my "orders from the government," and he quickly subsided from patronizing insolence to humility and sent a soldier to lead me to "where food is prepared for strangers." Two ancient crones, pottering about a mud stove in an open-work reed kitchen through which the mountain wind swept chillingly, half-cooked an enormous slab of veal, boiled a pot of the ubiquitous black coffee, and scraped together a bit of stale bread, or more exactly cake, for _pan dulce_ was the only species that the town afforded. A dish of tomatoes of the size of small cherries proved far more appetizing, after they had been well washed, but the astonishment with which the aged pair watched me eat them suggested that the tradition that held this fruit poison still reigns in Esperanza.
Back once more in the comandancia I resolved to repay the soldiers scattered about town for their insolence in the one way painful to the Honduranean--by making them exert themselves. Displaying again my "government order," I demanded a photograph of the garrison of Esperanza with the comandante, its generals, colonels, lieutenants, and all the lesser fry at the head; and an imperative command soon brought the entire force of fifty or more hurrying barefoot and startled, their ancient muskets under their arms, from the four somnolent corners of the city. I kept them maneuvering a half-hour or so, ostensibly for photographic reasons, while all the populace looked on, and the _reos_, or department prisoners in their chains, formed a languid group leaning on their shovels at the edge of the plaza waiting until their guards should be returned to them.