Early next morning as I was dressing I glanced out of my window and saw a man walking down the middle of the street with one end of a riata around his neck and a horseman riding behind at the other end of the riata.
"Where's that man going?" I inquired of the servant. "Going to be hanged?"
"Oh, no, only going to jail," answered the servant. "It's the easiest way to take them, you know. In a day or two," he added, "that man will be on his way to Valle Nacional. Everybody arrested here goes to Valle Nacional—everybody except the rich."
"I wonder if that same gang we saw last night will be going down on the train today," my companion, De Lara, said, as we made for the depot.
He did not wonder long, for we had hardly found seats when we saw the ten slaves and their rurale guards filing into the second-class coach adjoining. Three of the prisoners were well dressed and had unusually intelligent faces; the others were of the ordinary type of city or farm laborers. Two of the former were bright boys under twenty, one of whom burst into tears as the train pulled slowly out of Cordoba toward the dreaded valley.
Down into the tropics we slid, into the jungle, into the dampness and perfume of the lowlands, known as the hot country. We flew down a mountain, then skirted the rim of a gash-like gorge, looking down upon coffee plantations, upon groves of bananas, rubber and sugar cane, then into a land where it rains every day except in mid-winter. It was not hot—not real hot, like Yuma—but the passengers perspired with the sky.
We watched the exiles curiously, and at the first opportunity we made advances to the chief of the rurale
