All the long afternoon we ambled slowly south, the western rays of the sun burning as they struck our faces. Every hour or so we stopped at some station, shot to pieces by one army or the other during the three years of Revolution; there the train would be besieged by vendors of cigarettes, pine-nuts, bottles of milk, _camotes_, and _tamales_ rolled in corn-husks. Old women, gossiping, descended from the train, built themselves a little fire and boiled coffee. Squatting there, smoking their corn-husk cigarettes, they told one another interminable love stories. It was late in the evening when we pulled into Jimenez. I shouldered through the entire population, come down to meet the train, passed between the flaring torches of the little row of candy booths, and went along the street, where drunken soldiers alternated with painted girls, walking arm in arm, to Doña Luisa’s Station Hotel. It was locked. I pounded on the door and a little window opened at the side, showing an incredibly ancient woman’s face, crowned with straggly white hair. This being squinted at me through a pair of steel spectacles and remarked, "Well, I guess you’re all right!" Then there came a sound of bars being taken down, and the door swung open. Doña Luisa herself, a great bunch of keys at her belt, stood just inside. She held a large Chinaman by the ear, addressing him in fluent and profane Spanish. "_Chango_!" she said: "What do you mean by telling a guest at this hotel that there wasn’t any more hot cakes? Why didn’t you make some more? Now take your dirty little bundle and get out of here!" With a final wrench she released the squealing Oriental. "These damn heathen," she announced in English, "the nasty beggars! I don’t take any lip from a dirty Chinaman who can live on a nickel’s worth of rice a day!" Then she nodded apologetically toward the door. "There’s so many damned drunken generals around to-day that I’ve got to keep the door locked. I don’t want the —— —— Mexican ——s in here!" Doña Luisa is a small, dumpy American woman more than eighty years of age—a benevolent New-England-grandmother sort of person. For forty-five years she has been in Mexico, and thirty or more years ago, when her husband died, she began to keep the Station Hotel. War and peace make no difference to her. The American flag flies over the door and in her house she alone is boss. When Pascual Orozco took Jimenez, his men began a drunken reign of terror in the town. Orozco himself—Orozco the invincible, the fierce, who would as soon kill a person as not—came drunk to the Station Hotel with two of his officers and several women. Doña Luisa planted herself across the doorway—alone—and shook her fist in his face. "Pascual Orozco," she cried, "take your disreputable friends and go away from here. I’m keeping a decent hotel!" And Orozco went.... *CHAPTER II* *DUELLO A LA FRIGADA*