On my first morning at El Paso, where, by good luck, as already
explained, I arrived nine or ten hours behind time, I made an early
start for Juarez, the Mexican city on the opposite bank of the Rio
Grande. As I waited for the car at the corner of the street, a rosy
house finch stood on the top of a telegraph pole overhead, singing
ecstatically. The pretty creature, it is evident, is very much at home
in this bustling city, at least in winter, for I was hardly in my room
on the afternoon of my arrival before I heard its warble, and looking
out of the window beheld the bird perched upon the eaves of a building
across the way, where more than once since then I have heard and seen
it. I am sorry to add that the English sparrow, its most unworthy
rival, is here also, though for the moment in small numbers.
When the car came along, it proved to be an open one.
“A rather cold morning for open cars,” I said to the youthful conductor.
“Oh, we run open cars all winter,” he answered. “But I suppose we
don’t mind the cold so much,” he continued, emphasizing the pronoun,
“because we are out of doors all the time.”
A Northern tenderfoot might naturally be less inured to frigidity,
he seemed to imply; but I remarked that he wore the heaviest of
overcoats with the collar up. Warm days (much like New England June),
cool nights, clear skies, constant winds, dryness and dust--such is
the January climate of El Paso, if my four days have given me a fair
impression of its quality.
Presently we crossed a short bridge.
“Was that the river?” I asked my seatmate, a minute afterward, a sudden
suspicion coming over me, though it seemed so absurd that I was half
ashamed to betray it.
“Yes, sir; that was the Rio Grande. You’re in Mexico now,” he answered.
Yes, and that must have been the Mexican Custom House officer whom I
had seen step out of the door of a small building on the southern bank
of the river and salute our conductor so politely. None of us looked
like smugglers, I suppose. At all events, the car was not “held up,” as
happened at the other end of the bridge, a day or two later, while two
rather boisterous young fellows on the rear seat made themselves merry
over the attempt of Uncle Sam’s official representative to collect a
duty. International travel, even in an electric street-car, is liable
to complications.
As for the river, it was practically dry. Pedestrians were crossing
it--to save toll--on a few small stepping-stones at a point where the
current could not have been ten feet wide nor more than half of ten
inches deep. My seatmate explained that so much water was drawn off
above this point for irrigation purposes that the river had little left
for its own use; and in fact, more than once afterward I saw its bed
absolutely dry, so that even the stepping-stones had for the day gone
out of business. Yet it is a real _rio grande_, for all that, and the
life of a long, long strip of Texas.
Drought is the mark of this country. A friendly citizen (of whom, in my
ignorance, I had inquired about “suburban trains”!) warned me earnestly
against wandering far out of the town. If some Mexican did not kill me
“for the sake of the clothes I had on” (an ignoble death, surely), I
might get lost (an easy matter, by my adviser’s tell), in which event,
if nothing more serious happened to me, I should infallibly perish of
thirst.
The car took me through the compact little _ciudad_ (a five-minute
passage, perhaps), and I struck out for the country, along the line
of the Mexican Central Railroad, in the direction of the mountains,
heading my course for a cemetery out on the slope, in the midst of
the chaparral. White-necked ravens were foraging beside the track, as
little disturbed by human approach as so many English sparrows might
have been. “How soon the strange becomes familiar!” I thought. I had
never seen a white-necked raven (there is no whiteness visible,[12]
the bird being a very imp of darkness to look at it) till less than
twenty-four hours ago, and already I was passing it with something
like indifference. I was far from indifferent, however, two afternoons
later, when for the first time I watched a flock of several hundred
soaring in mazy circles high overhead, after the manner of buzzards or
sea-gulls.
No other birds showed themselves till I drew near the cemetery gate,
when suddenly the bushes just in front, straight between me and the
sun, were alive with sparrows. My eyes, dazzled as they were by the
sunshine, caught sight of one lark bunting as the flock took wing. I
must see more of it,--it was my first one,--and started eagerly in
pursuit. But the creatures were timid beyond all calculation, and
though I pursued them with cautious haste for some distance, I could
never come up with them. Wherever I looked, there was nothing but
white-crowned sparrows; handsome birds, the sight of which is almost an
event in Massachusetts, but so abundant in Texas at this time of the
year--as Lincoln finches are, also--that I have begun to turn away from
them as almost a nuisance. It becomes vexatious to a man in search of
novelties when even an old favorite keeps itself too persistently under
his glass. As the proverb has it, there is reason in all things.
While I was beating the chaparral over, still in search of those
missing white wing-patches, I noticed a funeral procession coming
from the city. Heading the cortege was what in a Massachusetts town
would be called a “depot carriage.” It served the purpose of a hearse,
I suppose, and in it sat two men bareheaded. It seemed a neighborly
and Christian act to accompany a brother mortal to the grave in this
fraternal manner. The second carriage was an open buggy, drawn by a
white horse.
These things I took note of while the procession was still a long way
off (a military band, still farther away, at the barracks, no doubt,
was playing a march), and meantime I went up to the cemetery fence and
looked over. The monuments were mostly, if not wholly, wooden crosses,
with the ordinary run of affectionate epitaphs. A man, who appeared to
be the keeper of the place, came out of the one house near at hand, and
asked me something in Spanish, to which I replied in English. We were
unable to communicate with each other till finally I said, “_No sabe._”
It was not precisely what I intended to tell him; but it was all one.
He saw for himself that I spoke no Spanish, and with that left me to
myself.
I returned to El Paso on foot, and as I reached the northern end of the
bridge, walking, as it happened, on the far side of the road, with my
overcoat on my arm, as careless as could be, I was hailed by an officer
in uniform. I halted, and he approached. Then he waited. It was my
place to speak first, as it seemed, and I began:
“Do you wish to inspect me?”
“Well, what did you buy in Mexico?” he asked.
“A postal-card, and mailed it.”
“Was that all you bought?”
“Yes.”
“All right.”
The souvenir postal-card industry, though comparatively infantile,
is not “protected,” it appears, although, if I had brought the
five-cents’ worth away with me, I might, for aught I positively know,
have been called upon for duty. The rights of American laboring men
must by all means be looked after. To think what ruin might befall
this great republic if its people, with all the rest of their freedom,
should in some fit of madness insist upon the freedom to buy and sell!
That was three days ago. Since then I have been to Juarez twice,
pushing a little farther each time into the country southward. On
both visits I found lark buntings in plenty. They move about--and sit
about--in peculiarly dense flocks. One such, that I saw this morning,
might have numbered a thousand birds. If disturbed, they rise in a
cloud, and on coming to rest again every one seems to desire a perch
at the very tip of a bush. As they must all alight in the same one or
two bunches of scrub, however, though there are hundreds of others
exactly like them all about, there are by no means top seats enough
to go round, and there is a deal of preliminary hovering, accompanied
by a grand confusion of formless twittering, during which--the white
patches of the quivering wings and outspread tails showing through--the
spectacle is most animated and pleasing.
As for the city itself, it is squalid, but well worth a visit; having
so strange and other-worldish a look that one seems to have crossed at
least an ocean rather than a trickling streamlet. The white church; the
little shops, with their curious wares; the game cocks in the street,
tethered each by a yard of cord to a peg driven into the ground on the
edge of the sidewalk, crowing defiance to each other, and regarded
proudly by their owners, who now and then take them up in their arms,
caressing them fondly, or shaking one in the face of another, to see
the feathers of their necks bristle; the bust of Bonito Juarez in the
fenced plaza, the bust itself of a size to adorn a parlor mantel, while
the marble pedestal is ten or fifteen feet high and at least ten feet
square at the base; the Spanish signboards and placards; best of all,
the people themselves, men, women, and children--the children, some
of them, half naked, even on a cold, windy forenoon, while the men
saunter about, or lean against an adobe wall in the sun, wrapped in
thick, bright-colored blankets (I shall think of a Mexican, as long as
I live, as leaning against the side of a house)--all these go to make a
memorable picture for a Yankee on his travels.