marriage within its domain, but for the henequen planters of Yucatan all things are possible. To a Yaqui woman a native of Asia is no less repugnant than he is to an American woman, yet one of the first barbarities the henequen planter imposes upon the Yaqui slave woman, freshly robbed of the lawful husband of her bosom, is to compel her to marry a Chinaman and live with him!
"We do that," explained one of the planters to me, "in order to make the Chinamen better satisfied and less inclined to run away. And besides we know that every new babe born on the place will some day be worth anywhere from $500 to $1,000 cash!"
The cultivated white woman, you say, would die of the shame and the horror of such conditions. But so does the brown woman of Sonora. No less a personage than Don Enrique Camara Zavala, president of the "Camara de Agricola de Yucatan," and a millionaire planter himself, told me:
"If the Yaquis last out the first year they generally get along all right and make good workers, but the trouble is, at least two-thirds of them die off in the first twelve months!"
On the ranch of one of the most famous henequen kings we found about two hundred Yaquis. One-third of these were men, who were quartered with a large body of Mayas and Chinamen. Entirely apart from these, and housed in a row of new one-room huts, each set in a tiny patch of uncultivated land, we discovered the Yaqui women and children.
We found them squatting around on their bare floors or nursing an open-air fire and a kettle just outside the back door. We found no men among them, Yaquis or
