"Which would you rather be," I asked of him, "a half-timer or a full-timer?"
"A full-timer," he replied, promptly, and then in a lower tone: "They work us until we are ready to fall, then they throw us away to get strong again. If they worked the full-timers like they work us they would die."
"We come to work gladly," said another young Maya, "because we're starved to it. But before the end of the first week we want to run away. That is why they lock us up at night."
"Why don't you run away when you're free to do it?" I asked. "When they turn you out, I mean?"
The administrador had stepped away to scold a woman. "It's no use," answered the man earnestly. "They always get us. Everybody is against us and there is no place to hide."
"They keep our faces on photographs," said another. "They always get us and give us a cleaning-up (beating) besides. When we're here we want to run away, but when they turn us out we know that it's no use."
I was afterwards to learn how admirably the Yucatan country is adapted to preventing the escape of runaways. No fruits or eatable herbs grow wild in that rocky land. There are no springs and no place where a person can dig a well without a rock drill and dynamite. So every runaway in time finds his way to a plantation or to the city, and at either place he is caught and held for identification. A free laborer who does not carry papers to prove that he is free is always liable to be locked up and put to much trouble to prove that he is not a runaway slave.
Yucatan has been compared to Russia's Siberia. "Siberia," Mexican political refugees have told me, "is hell
