_"To-day has come your tamer,_ _The Father of Rooster Tamers,_ _To run you out of Torreon—_ _To the devil with your skins!_ _"The rich with all their money_ _Have already got their lashing,_ _As the soldiers of Urbina_ _Can tell, and those of Maclovio Herrera._ _"Fly, fly away, little dove,_ _Fly over all the prairies,_ _And say that Villa has come_ _To drive them all out forever._ _"Ambition will ruin itself,_ _And justice will be the winner,_ _For Villa has reached Torreon_ _To punish the avaricious."_ _"Fly away, Royal Eagle,_ _These laurels carry to Villa,_ _For he has come to conquer_ _Bravo and all his colonels._ _"Now you sons of the Mosquito,_ _Your pride will come to an end._ _If Villa has come to Torreon,_ _It is because he could do it!_ _"Viva Villa and his soldiers!_ _Viva Herrera and his gente!_ _You have seen, wicked people,_ _What a brave man can do._ _"With this now I say good-bye;_ _By the Rose of Castile,_ _Here is the end of my rhyme_ _To the great General Villa!"_ After a while I slipped away, and I doubt if they even saw me go. They sang around their fire for more than three hours. But in our cuartel there was other entertainment. The room was full of smoke from the fire on the floor. Through it I dimly made out some thirty or forty troopers squatting or sprawled at full length—perfectly silent as Silveyra read aloud a proclamation from the Governor of Durango forever condemning the lands of the great haciendas to be divided among the poor. He read: "Considering: that the principal cause of discontent among the people in our State, which forced them to spring to arms in the year 1910, was the absolute lack of individual property; and that the rural classes have no means of subsistence in the present, nor any hope for the future, except to serve as peons on the haciendas of the great land owners, who have monopolized the soil of the State; "Considering: that the principal branch of our national riches is agriculture, and that there can be no true progress in agriculture without that the majority of farmers have a personal interest in making the earth produce.... "Considering, finally: that the rural towns have been reduced to the deepest misery, because the common lands which they once owned have gone to augment the property of the nearest hacienda, especially under the Dictatorship of Diaz; with which the inhabitants of the State lost their economic, political, and social independence, then passed from the rank of citizens to that of slaves, without the Government being able to lift the moral level through education, because the hacienda where they lived is private property.... "Therefore, the Government of the State of Durango declares it a public necessity that the inhabitants of the towns and villages be the owners of agricultural lands...."