I was getting pretty sick of all this trickery, and was glad, a couple of months later, to hear of a new company formed in Los Angeles who were looking for a man to go down to Mexico to take charge of a contract they had there. I reckoned that conditions would be so different there that things might be run on the square. I went to the manager and president of the new company and applied for the position of superintendent. He took me in his auto and we went over the different jobs I had done, with which he seemed satisfied. So we signed a contract for six months at $4.50 per day, which was to be raised at the end of six months if everything was satisfactory. I then went to see the manager of the company I was with and told him of the offer. He told me he did not wish to stand in my way if I wished to go, and that if I did not like Mexico he would try to place me again if I cared to come back; but that owing to the keen competition in Los Angeles they could not offer me a higher salary. So on 4th September 1904 I left Los Angeles for Guadalajara, Mexico, the second largest city in the republic (population 130,000). Poor Arthur, they got him a few months after I left the city, as, being an honourable man, he was unable to make a single contract pay; so the Barber Company dismissed him to make way for a new man who had no enemies in the city. Arthur followed in my footsteps, and went to work for the company which he had been fighting for so many years. A few months later came the elections, and the street superintendent was himself turned out of office (if only Arthur could have outlasted him!), and immediately started a paving company of his own to fight the other two; and owing to his general crookedness and knowledge of the political ropes of the town he seems to be making a success of it. The Barber Company is an immense corporation with hundreds of branches and dozens of different names to work under, but its most desperate fight has always been with its own men, who turn and rend it. CHAPTER XXV The Barber Company—Guadalajara—Mexican mendacity—Don Miguel Ahumada—His humanity and justice.