how fiercely the women sometimes fought against the assaults of the men and how he had at times enjoyed peering through a crack and watching those tragic encounters of the night! All night we were disturbed—mostly by the hacking, tearing coughs that came to us through the chinks, sometimes by heart-breaking sobs.
De Lara and I did not speak about these things until the morning, when I remarked upon his haggard face.
"I heard the sobs and the coughs and the groans," said De Lara. "I heard the women cry, and I cried, too—three times I cried. I do not know how I can ever laugh and be happy again!"
While we waited for breakfast the Presidente told us many things about the slavery and showed us a number of knives and files which had been taken from the slaves at various times. Like penitentiary convicts, the slaves had somehow got possession of the tools in the hope of cutting a way out of their prison at night and escaping the sentries.
The Presidente told us frankly that the authorities of Mexico City, of Veracruz, of Oaxaca, of Pachuca and of Jalapa regularly engage in the slave traffic, usually in combination with one or more "labor agents." He especially named the mayor of a certain well known seaport, who was mentioned in the American newspapers as an honored guest of President Roosevelt in 1908 and a prominent visitor to the Republican convention at Chicago. This mayor, said our Presidente, regularly employed his city detective force as a dragnet for slaves. He arrested all sorts of people on all sorts of pretexts merely for the sake of the forty-five pesos apiece that they would bring from the tobacco planters.
Our conversation that morning was interrupted by a Spanish foreman who rode up and had a talk with the
