J.W. watched the box-car life with a good deal of curiosity. Here and there were poor little attempts at color and adornment; flowers in window boxes and bits of lace at the windows. Delafield had plenty of foreigners, but these were foreigners of another sort. They seemed to be entirely at home. "I suppose," he said to Finch, "these Mexicans have come to the States to get away from the robbery and ruin that Mexico has had instead of government these last ten years and more." "Yes," Finch answered, "thousands of 'em. But not all. Some of these Mexicans are older Americans than we are. We took 'em over when we got Texas and New Mexico and California from Old Mexico. They were here then, speaking the Spanish their ancestors had learned three hundred years ago and more. But they're all the same Mexicans, no matter on which side of the Rio Grande they were born. Of course those born on this side have had some advantages that the peons never knew." "But do you mean," J.W. wanted to know, "that they are not really American citizens?" Fred Finch said no, he didn't mean exactly that. Certainly, those born on this side were American citizens in the eyes of the law, and those who came across the Rio Grande could get naturalized. But that made little real difference. A Mexican was a Mexican, and you had to deal with him as one. J.W. was not quite satisfied with that explanation, but he preferred to wait until he had seen enough so that he could ask his questions more intelligently. So he kept relatively still, but his eyes did not cease from observing. As the trip progressed, and the jumps between towns became longer, the young salesman had time to see a good deal. In the far Southwest he became aware that the increasingly numerous Mexican population was no longer a matter of box-car dwellers, more or less migratory. It was a settled people. Its little adobe villages, queer and quaint as they seemed to Middle-Western eyes, were centers of established life. And he discovered that in these villages always one building overshadowed all the rest. One day as they were headed towards El Paso he ventured to mention this to his traveling companion. "Seems to me," he said, "that none of these little mud villages is too poor to have a church, and mostly a pretty good church too. How do they manage it?" Now Finch was no student of church life, but he did know a little about the country. "That's the way it is all over this Southwest, my boy, and across the line in Old Mexico it's a good deal more so. My guess is that the churches and the priests began by teaching the people that whatever else happened they had to put up for the church, and from what I've noticed I reckon that now nothing else matters much to the church. It has become a kind of poor relation that's got to be fed and helped, whether it amounts to anything or not. But it's a long way from being as humble and thankful as you would naturally expect a poor relation to be."