An hour's walk next morning brought me to Gracias, a slovenly, nothing-to-do-but-stare hamlet of a few hundred inhabitants. After I had eaten all the chief hut could supply, I set about looking for the shoemaker my already aged Guatemalan Oxfords needed so badly. I found the huts where several of them lived, but not where any of them worked. The first replied from his hammock that he was sick, the second had gone to Tegucigalpa, the third was "somewhere about town if you have the patience to wait." Which I did for an hour or more, and was rewarded with his turning up to inform me that he was not planning to begin his labors again so soon, for only yesterday had been Christmas.
Over the first hill and river beyond, I fell in with a woman who carried on an unbroken conversation as well as a load on her head, from the time she accepted the first cigar until we had waded the thigh-deep "rio grande" and climbed the rocky bank to her hut and garden. At first she had baldly refused to allow her picture to be taken. But so weak-willed are these people of Honduras that a white man of patience can in time force them to do his bidding by sheer force of will, by merely looking long and fixedly at them. Many the "gringo" who has misused this power in Central America. Before we reached her home she had not only posed but insisted on my stopping to photograph her with her children "dressed up" as befitted so extraordinary an occasion. Her garden was unusually well supplied with fruit and vegetables, and the rice boiled in milk she served was the most savory dish I had tasted in Honduras. She refused payment, but insisted on my waiting until the muleteers she had charged for their less sumptuous dinner were gone, so they should not discover her unpatriotic favoritism.
During the afternoon there was for a time almost level going, grassy and soft, across gently dipping meadows on which I left both mule-trains and pedestrians behind. Houses were rare, and the fall of night threatened to leave me alone among vast whining pine forests where the air was already chill. In the dusk, however, I came upon the hut of Pablo Morales and bespoke posada. He growled a surly permission and addressed hardly a word to me for hours thereafter. The place was the most filthy, quarrelsome, pig and chicken overrun stop on the trip, and when at last I prepared to swing my hammock inside the hut the sulky host informed me that he only permitted travelers the _corredor_. Two other guests--ragged, soil-encrusted arrieros--were already housed within, but there were at least some advantages in swinging my own net outside from the rafters of the eaves. Pigs jolted against me now and then and before I had entirely fallen asleep I was disturbed by a procession of dirty urchins, each carrying a blazing pine stick, who came one by one to look me over. I was just settling down again when Pablo himself appeared, an uncanny figure in the dancing light of his flaming torch. He had heard that I could "put people on paper," and would I put his wife on paper in return for his kindness in giving me posada? Yes, in the morning. Why couldn't I do it now? He seemed strangely eager, for a man accustomed to set mañana as his own time of action. His surly indifference had changed to an annoying solicitude, and he forced upon me first a steaming tortilla, then a native beverage, and finally came with a large cloth hammock in which I passed the night more comfortably than in my own open-work net.