On the mule-car that dragged and jolted us out to the "Niagara of Mexico" were three resident Germans who strove to be "simpático" to the natives by a clumsy species of "horse play." Their asininity is worth mention only because among those laughing at their antics was a peon who had been gashed across the hand, half-severing his wrist, yet who sat on the back platform without even a rag around the wound, though with a rope tourniquet above. Two gray and decrepit policemen rode with him and half way out stopped at a stone hut to arrest the perpetrator of the deed and bring him along, wrapped in the customary red sarape and indifference.
The waterfall over a broad face of rock was pleasing but not extraordinary, and swinging on my rucksack I struck off afoot. The lightly rolling land was very fertile, with much corn, great droves of cattle, and many shallow lakes, its climate a pleasant cross between late spring and early fall. From El Castillo the path lay along the shimmering railroad, on which I outdid the train to Atequisa station.
The orange vendors lolling here under the shade of their hats gave the distance to Chapala as fifteen miles, and advised me to hire a horse or take passage in the stage. This primitive bone-shaker, dark-red in color, the body sitting on huge leather springs, was drawn by four teams of mules in tandem, and before revolution spread over the land was customarily packed to the roof and high above it with excursionists to Mexico's chief inland watering-place. Now it dashed back and forth almost empty.
I preferred my own legs. A soft road led between orange-groves--at the station were offered for sale seedless oranges compared to which those of California are pigmies--to the drowsing town of Atequisa. Through one of its crumbling stone gates the way spread at large over its sandy, sun-bathed plaza, then contracted again to a winding wide trail, rising leisurely into the foothills beyond. A farmer of sixty, homeward bound to his village of Santa Cruz on a loose-eared ass, fell in with me. He lacked entirely that incommunicative manner and half-resentful air I had so often encountered in the Mexican, and his country dialect whiled away the time as we followed the unfenced "road" around and slowly upward into hills less rugged than those about Guanajuato and thinly covered with coarse grass and small brush. Twenty-one years ago he had worked here as _mozo_ for "gringoes," my compatriots. They had offered him a whole peso a day if he would not get married. But "he and she both wanted," so "qué quiera usté'"? They had started farming on a little piece of rocky ridge. He would point it out to me when we came nearer. By and by he had bought another piece of land for fifty pesos and then _poco á poco_ for forty pesos some more. Then for twenty-four pesos and fifty centavos he had bought a cow, and the _vaca_ before long gave them a fine calf and twelve _cuartillos_ of milk a day. So that he was able to buy another heifer and then an ox and finally another ox and--