"That’s easy fixed," said the Major. "When I go back to the States I leave my name here. I’m going to stay down here till I get enough of a stake to go back to Georgia and start a child-labor factory." The other boy had suddenly burst into tears. "I got my arm shot through in Ojinaga," he sobbed, "and now they’re turning me loose without any money, and I can’t work. When I get to El Paso the cops ’ll jail me and I’ll have to write my dad to come and take me home to California. I run away from there last year," he explained. "Look here, Major," I advised, "you’d better not stay down here if Villa wants Americans out of the ranks. Being a Mexican citizen won’t help you if Intervention comes." "Perhaps you’re right," agreed the Major thoughtfully. "Aw, quit your bawling, Jack! I guess I’ll beat it over to Galveston and get on a South American boat. They say there’s a revolution started in Peru." The soldier was about thirty, the Irishman twenty-five, and the three others somewhere between sixteen and eighteen. "What did you fellows come down here for?" I asked. "Excitement!" answered the soldier and the Irishman, grinning. The three boys looked at me with eager, earnest faces, drawn with hunger and hardship. "Loot!" they said simultaneously. I cast an eye at their dilapidated garments, at the throngs of tattered volunteers parading around the plaza, who hadn’t been paid for three months, and restrained a violent impulse to shout with mirth. Soon I left them, hard, cold misfits in a passionate country, despising the cause for which they were fighting, sneering at the gaiety of the irrepressible Mexicans. And as I went away I said, "By the way; what company did you fellows belong to? What did you call yourselves?" The red-haired youth answered, "The Foreign Legion!" he said. I want to say right here that I saw few soldiers of fortune except one—and he was a dry-as-dust scientist studying the action of high explosives in field-guns—who would not have been tramps in their own country. It was late night when I finally got back to the hotel. Doña Luisa went ahead to see to my room, and I stopped a moment in the bar. Two or three soldiers, evidently officers, were drinking there—one pretty far gone. He was a pock-marked man with a trace of black mustache; his eyes couldn’t seem to focus. But when he saw me he began to sing a pleasant little song: I thought it diplomatic to leave, because you can never tell what a Mexican will do when he’s drunk. His temperament is much too complicated.