_"I remained at the foot of a green maguey_ _My ungrateful love went away with another._ _I awoke to the song of the lark:_ _Oh, what a hangover I have, and the barkeeps won’t trust me!_ _"O God, take away this sickness,_ _I feel as if I were surely going to die—_ _The Virgin of pulque and whisky must save me:_ _O what a hangover, and nothing to drink!..."_ It is some sixty-five miles from La Zarca to the Hacienda of La Cadena, where the Tropa was to be stationed. We rode it in one day, without water and without food. The coach soon left us far behind. Pretty soon, the barrenness of the land gave way to spiny, hostile vegetation,—the cactus and the mesquite. We strung out along a deep rut between the gigantic chaparral, choked with the mighty cloud of alkali dust, scratched and torn by the thorny brush. Sometimes emerging in an open space, we could see the straight road climbing the summits of the rolling desert, until the eye couldn’t follow it; but we knew it must be there, still farther and farther again. Not a breath of wind stirred. The vertical sun beat down with a fury that made one reel. And most of the troop, who had been drunk the night before, began to suffer terribly. Their lips glazed, cracked, turned dark blue. I didn’t hear a single word of complaint; but there was nothing of the lighthearted joking and rollicking of other days. José Valiente taught me how to chew mesquite twigs, but that didn’t help much. When we had been riding for hours, Fidencio pointed ahead, saying huskily: "Here comes a _christiano_!" When you realize that word _christiano_, which now means simply Man, is descended among the Indians from immeasurable antiquity,—and when the man that says it looks exactly as Guatemozin might have looked, it gives you curious sensations. The _christiano_ in question was a very aged Indian driving a burro. No, he said, he didn’t carry any water. But Sabas leaped from his horse and tumbled the old man’s pack on the ground. "Ah!" he cried; "fine! _Tres piedras_!" and held up a root of the _sotol_ plant, which looks like a varnished century-plant, and oozes with intoxicating juices. We divided it as you divide an artichoke. Pretty soon everybody felt better.... It was at the end of the afternoon that we rounded a shoulder of the desert and saw ahead the gigantic ashen alamo trees that surrounded the spring of the Hacienda of Santo Domingo. A pillar of brown dust, like the smoke of a burning city, rose from the corral, where _vaqueros_ were roping horses. Desolate and alone stood the Casa Grande, burned by Che Che Campa a year ago. And by the spring, at the foot of the alamo trees, a dozen wandering peddlers squatted around their fire, their burros munching corn. From the fountain to the adobe houses and back moved an endless chain of women water-carriers,—the symbol of northern Mexico.