lashes of the wet rope. I ascertained that he had been only a month in Yucatan, and but three days before had been put in the field with a harvesting gang to cut and trim the great leaves of the henequen plant. Two thousand a day was the regular stint for each slave, and Bajeca had been given three days in which to acquire the dexterity necessary to harvest the required number of leaves. He had failed. Hence the flogging. There had been no other fault.
"It's a wonder," I remarked to a capataz, "that this Yaqui did not tear himself from the back of the Chinaman. It's a wonder he did not fight. He seems like a brave man; he has the look of a fighter."
The capataz chuckled.
"One month ago he was a fighter," was the reply, "but a Yaqui learns many things in a month in Yucatan. Still, there was a time when we thought this dog would never learn. Now and then they come to us that way; they never learn; they're never worth the money that's paid for them."
"Tell me about this one," I urged.
"He fought; that's all. The day he came he was put to work loading bundles of leaves onto the elevator which leads to the cleaning machine. The mayordomo—yes, the mayordomo primero—happened along and punched the fellow in the stomach with his cane. A half minute later a dozen of us were struggling to pull that Yaqui wolf away from the throat of the mayordomo. We starved him for a day and then dragged him out for a cleaning up. But he fought with his fingers and with his teeth until a capataz laid him out with the blunt edge of a machete. After that he tasted the rope daily for a while, but every day for no less than a week the fool fought crazily on until he kissed the earth under
