As I passed on over the rise of ground ahead, huddled groups of men, women, and children fell in after me as if for protection from their own people. At dusk I entered Paracho with a good thirty miles behind me. It was a quaint little town in a lap of valley surrounded by pined hills and with the overhanging Japanese eaves peculiar to the region. The inhabitants were entirely peons and Indians, none in "European" dress. The vision of being carried into the place with a few stray bits of lead lodged in one's anatomy was not alluring, and the dark dirty little _cárcel_ on the plaza looked equally uninteresting.
I turned in at the "Mesón de la Providencia." The keeper gave his attention chiefly to his little liquor and corn shop wide-opening on the street. There were several large rooms above, however, facing the great corral where mules and asses were munching and arrieros had spread their straw and blankets for the night, and in at least one of them was not merely a wooden-floored cot but two sheets to go with it. I bathed in the tin washbasin and turned out redressed for a turn through the town. It swarmed with liquor-shops. Apparently any one with nothing else to do could set up a little drunkery or street-stand without government interference. There was no pulque, the maguey being unknown to the region, but bottled mescal and aguardiente de caña amply made up for it. It seemed uncanny that one could talk with ease to these unlettered dwellers in the wilderness in the same tongue learned in a peaceful class-room of the far North. A towsled woman or child drifted now and then into the mesón shop to buy a Mexican cent's worth of firewood. The woman who kept the shanty _fonda_ down the street boasted of having lived nineteen months in California in her halcyon days, but was obliged to borrow enough of me in advance to buy the ingredients of the scanty supper she finally prepared. By eight the corral was snoring with arrieros and I ascended to my substantial couch.
A wintry cold of the highlands hung over Paracho when dawn crawled in to find me shivering under a light blanket. As I left the place behind, the sun began to peer through the crest pines of a curiously formed mountain to the east, and to rend and tear the heavy fog banks hanging over the town and valley. Peons tight-wrapped in their blankets from eyes to knees slipped noiselessly past. There was a penetrating chill in the air, the fields were covered white with what seemed to be hoar frost, and the grassy way was wet with dew as after a heavy shower.