They glanced at one another, the glance of brothers, the glance of men who had seen a great deal of life and death. Raul's hand felt for Manuel's arm and gripped it with gratitude and affection. 9 Donato Farias: 1 bandana 0.25 2-½ kil. tobacco 2.30 cig. papers 0.70 shoes 3.50 2-½ met. cloth 2.25 (for trousers) 6 kil. beans 1.80 4 kil. sugar 1.20 salt 0.62 dried chili 0.10 ------ 12.72 Farias had purchased these items during the last month. Each week he earned twelve pesos but received nothing in cash. His total indebtedness at the _tienda de raya_ amounted to 1,291.68 pesos. Raul, perched on a three-legged stool at the desk in the _tienda de raya_, mumbled Farias' name and x'd his account; then signed and dated the sheet. Flipping to the S pages, he canceled Salvador's account, which totaled over fifteen hundred pesos. Esperito, his father's bookkeeper, had faked entries and Raul spotted them with half an eye; the corroded brass pen between his fingers, he felt Esperito's pocked face over his shoulder, objecting. Let the ghost object: Esperito had been packed off to Guadalajara, to another job of pencil chewing and peso bickering. Raul wiped the nib of the pen on the desk blotter, pleased that he had control and could be generous. Deliberately tapping the tobacco into his pipe bowl, liking the aroma, he smoked a while, hacienda noises coming in through the open windows. Sun streaked the freckled Petaca map, with its residence, ponds, villages, roads and mountains. His father had tacked it up. A colored print of Porfirio Díaz (as a young man) dangled over the stained flattop desk. A Mosler safe, with New England autumn landscape on its door, squatted under a heap of account books, cattle magazines, boxes of nails, screws and bolts, its casters in dust, sand and pigeon feathers. All other space in the room was shelved with supplies, soap, boxes of nails and hinges, bundles of machetes, bolts of cloth, cans of tobacco and oil, packages of tobacco and cigarette papers, tins of coffee and gunpowder, the thousand and one things needed at an hacienda. A thousand times a week Petacan men and women talked of the _tienda de raya_ and cursed its prices. The same words were heard at a thousand haciendas. The _tienda_ was the core of the peasants' lives, for there they bought their servitude, since no _hacendado_ permitted purchases anywhere else. The _tienda_ was everyman's ball and chain. Sons inherited their father's indebtedness. If a man fled, the rurales had a way of picking him up with uncanny rapidity.