During all this time there was no sign whatever of the performers. I don’t know how long we sat there, but nobody made any comment on the fact. The audience was not there primarily to see the Pastores; it was there to see and hear whatever took place, and everything interested it. But being a restless, practical Westerner, alas! I broke the charmed silence to ask a woman next to me when the play would begin. "Who knows?" she answered tranquilly. A newcomer, after turning my question and the answer over in his mind, leaned across. "Perhaps to-morrow," he said. I noticed that the band was playing no longer. "It appears," he continued, "that there are other Pastores at Doña Perdita’s house. They tell me that those who were to have performed here have gone up there to see them. And the musicians have also gone up there. For the past half-hour I have been considering seriously going up there myself." We left him, still considering seriously; the rest of the audience had settled down for an evening of pleasant gossip, having apparently forgotten the Pastores altogether. Outside, the ticket-taker with our peso had long since gathered his companions to him and sought the pleasing hilarity of a cantina. And so we strolled slowly up the street toward the edge of town where the whitewashed plaster walls of rich men’s houses give way to the undecorated adobes of the poor. There all pretense of streets ended, and we went along burro paths between huts scattered according to their owners’ whims, through dilapidated corrals to the house of the widow of Don Tomas. It was built of sun-dried mud bricks, jutting part way into the mountain itself, and looked as the stable of Bethlehem must have looked. As if to carry out the analogy, a great cow lay in the moonlight just beneath the window, breathing and chewing her cud. Through the window and the door, over a throng of heads, we could see candle light playing on the ceiling and hear a whining chant sung by girlish voices, and the beat of crooks keeping time on the floor with jingling bells.