We worked half an hour jacking up the car. No sooner had we got it where it should be, than the car’s weight sank it in the mud, and we had to begin again our snail process. To my delight, Toby was fascinated by the thing, and from that hour claimed it as her own. We mutually divided the labor as our tastes and talents dictated. It seemed that Toby revelled in handling tools, which dropped from my inept grasp, while my sense of mechanics and experience surpassed hers. I was to be the diagnostician, she the surgeon. In other words, I bossed the job, while she did the work. While Toby struggled with the jack a Mexican on a flea-bitten cayuse slouched on the horizon. He was black and hairy, and one “six-gun” in his teeth would have signed his portrait as Captain of the Bandits. I stopped him and asked him to lend us his brute strength, which he smilingly did, pleased as a child at being initiated into the sacred mysteries of motoring. When I allowed him to propel the socket-wrench his cup ran over. He did everything backward, but he furnished horse-sense, which we lacked, and when we attempted to lift heavy weights, he courteously supplanted us. The three of us invented a lingua franca in Mexican, Italian, French and musical terms. “Tire,--avanti!” Gesture of lifting. Groan,--signifying great weight. “Troppo,--troppo! Largo, largo! Ne faites pas ça! Ah-h, si, si,--bono hombre, multo, multo bono hombre!” Thus encouraged, he worked willingly and faithfully, and at the end of a half hour’s toil, waved aside our thanks, untied his weary cayuse, and raised his sombrero. He had not robbed us nor beaten us, but had acted as one Christian to another. I ran after him saying fluently, as if I had known the language all my life, “Multo, multo, beaucoup bono hombre.” He showed his brilliant teeth. I offered him money, which he at first refused. “Bono hombre,” I insisted, “Cigarettos!” And so he took it, much pleased. He thoroughly enjoyed the episode. I hope his boss did, when he arrived an hour late. Toby enjoyed the episode, too, and persisted in sending home postcards, on which she spoke of being rescued by a Mexican bandit. During the morning several little towns,--all alike, flitted by us,--Sabinal, Hondo, Dunlay. At Hondo, where the mud was thickest, we stopped at a little general store for lunch. The proprietor, a tall, vague man, discussed earnestly, as one connoisseur to another, the merits of the various tinned goods he submitted, and after a leisurely chat and several purchases, in which the matter of trade became secondary, he urged on us several painted sticks of candy, a new kind which he said he enjoyed sucking during his solitary guard at the store. After the customary, “You’re a long ways from home,” he bade us goodbye, hopefully but sadly, as one would a consumptive great-aunt about to take a trip to the North Pole, and watched us bump out of sight.