Our way lay for the next few days through forty-odd miles of a country densely wooded but traversed by a fair road. This latter had earned a bad reputation of late as being infested by bandits, Mexican criminals shipped from Vera Cruz to serve against the Indians, who had deserted and betaken themselves to the woods with their rifles. Only a few days before our arrival a gang of them had murdered three Indians who were in charge of a drove of pigs. It had been such collar-work inducing the Do-littleians to do even the little they did that it was wearing well on to four o'clock before we found ourselves out into the open. Once past the outlying huts of Valladolid, the dust of the rock-strewn road changed into a brick-red loam. In many parts of Yucatan for scores of miles at a time the tracks through the forest are red like this, suggestive of nothing so much as a rough cart road to an English brick-field. Once you have seen one such road you have seen them all, for they are as like as two pins. The dense woods hemmed us in on each side, and the monotony was only broken now and again by meeting straggling parties of Indians, naked but for breech-cloth, with rough plaited straw hats, their long guns slung on their brown backs, a linen hunting bag at their waist, on their way to shoot in the woods. Throughout Eastern Yucatan every Indian is out at dawn and sundown to pick up something for the pot. Their guns are for the most part antiquated muzzle-loaders, single-barrelled, sometimes of obviously home manufacture. They are poor sportsmen from the English point of view, for they are out to kill, and they think nothing of following a bird up for a mile or two till they can shoot it sitting. They were a very different breed of men from those Indians we had seen nearer Merida, and some of them even looked truculent. But they gave us a very civil "_Buenas tardes!_" ("Good afternoon!") as they stopped to rest on their guns and gaze with wonder at such an unusual spectacle as two khaki-clad Englishmen and the three laden horses.