The "values" were next run down into smaller vats and treated with zinc shavings, precipitating a 50 per cent. pure metal, black in color, which was put into melting-pots in a padlocked room overseen by an American. Here it was cast in large brick molds, these being knocked off and the metal left to slack, after which it was melted again and finally turned into gray-black blocks of the size and form of a paving-brick, 85 per cent. pure, about as heavy as the average lady would care to lift, and worth something like $1250 each. Two or four of these were tied on the back of a donkey and a train of them driven under guard to the town office, whence they were shipped to Mexico City, and finally made into those elusive things called coins, or sundry articles for the vainglorious, shipped abroad or stolen by revolutionists. On this same ground the old colonial Spaniards used to spread the ore in a cobbled patio, treat it with mercury, and drive mules round and round in it for weeks until they pocketed whatever was left to them after paying the king's fifth and the tithes of the church.
My rucksack on the back of a peon--and it is astonishing how much more easily one's possessions carry in that fashion; as if it were indeed that automatic baggage on legs I have long contemplated inventing--I set off to the neighboring mine of "Peregrina." As the peon was accustomed to carry anything short of a grand piano, he did not complain at this half-day excursion under some twenty pounds. Being drawn out, he grew quite cheery on this new fashion of carrying--"when the load is not much." In the cool morning air, with a wind full of ozone sweeping across the high country, the trail lay across tumbled stretches of rocky ground, range behind range of mountains beyond and a ruined stone hut or corral here and there carrying the memory back to Palestine. For a half hour we had Guanajuato in full sight in its narrow gully far below. Many donkeys pattered by under their loads of encinal fagots, the ragged, expressionless drivers plodding silently at their heels.
Ahead grew the roar of "Peregrina's" stamp-mill, and I was soon winding through the gorge-hung village. According to the manager, I had chosen well the time of my coming, for there was "something doing." We strolled about town until he had picked up the jefe político, a handsome Mexican, built as massive as an Aztec stone idol, under a veritable haystack of hat, who ostensibly at least was a sworn friend of the mining company. With him we returned to the deafening stamp-mill and brought up in the "zinc room," where the metal is cast into bricks. Here the stealing of ore by workmen is particularly prevalent, and even the searching by the trusty at the gate not entirely effective, for even the skimming off of the scum leaves the floor scattered with chips of silver with a high percentage of gold which even the American in charge cannot always keep the men from concealing. Hence there occurs periodically the scene we were about to witness.