but ten pesos is a lot of money, and no one would let it go by. Besides, if one doesn't get it another will, and even though the runaway should get out of the valley, when he reaches Cordoba he finds the enganchador Tresgallo, waiting there to send him back."
"One time," another native told us, "I saw a man leaning against a tree beside the trail. As I rode up I spoke to him, but he did not move. His arm was doubled against the tree trunk and his eyes seemed to be studying the ground. I touched his shoulder and found that he was stiff—dead. He had been turned out to die and had walked so far. How do I know he was not a runaway? Ah, Senor, I knew. You would have known, too, had you seen his swollen feet and the bones of his face—almost bare. No man who looks like that could run away!"
Just at nightfall we rode into Jacatepec, and there we found the slave gang ahead of us. They had started first and had kept ahead, walking the twenty-four miles of muddy trail, though some of them were soft from jail confinement. They were sprawled out on a patch of green beside the detention house.
The white linen collar of Amado Godaniz was gone now. The pair of fine shoes, nearly new, which he wore on the train, were on the ground beside him, heavy with mud and water. His bare feet were small, as white as a woman's and as tender, and both showed bruises and scratches. Since that evening at Jacatepec I have often thought of Amado Godaniz and have wondered—with a shiver—how those tender white feet fared among the tropical flies of Valle Nacional. "They are sending us to our death—to our death!" The news that Amado Godaniz were alive today would surprise me. That night he seemed to realize that he would never need those fine
