"I tried to get 'em to cut out this ---- ---- German monkey business of throwing their feet around," confided the chief sadly, "but it's no use, for it's in the ---- ---- military manual."
Judged by Central American standards the force was well trained. But the poor Indians and half-breeds that made up its bulk were so overwhelmed with the solemnity of the extraordinary occasion that they were even more ox-like in their clumsiness and nearer frightened apes in demeanor than in their native jungles. The quaking fear of making a mis-step caused them to keep their eyes riveted on the lips of our compatriot, from which, instead of the words of wrath they no doubt often imagined, issued some such remark as:
"Why ---- ---- it, W----, one of the bums I picked up along the line one day in Guatemala told me the best ---- ---- yarn that--"
Nor could they guess that the final verdict on the great ceremony that rang forth on the awe-struck silence as the chief rose to his feet was:
"Well, drop around to my room in the hotel when you want to hear the rest of it. But if you see the sign on my door,' Ladies Only To-day,' don't knock. The chambermaid may not have finished her official visit."
The climate of Tegucigalpa leaves little to be desired. Otherwise it is merely a large Central American village of a few thousand inhabitants, with much of the indifference, uncleanliness, and ignorance of the rest of the republic. Priests are numerous, wandering about smoking their cigarettes and protected from the not particularly hot sun by broad hats and umbrellas. One lonely little native sheet masquerades as a newspaper, the languid little shops, often owned by foreigners, offer a meager and ancient stock chiefly imported and all high in price; for it takes great inducement to make the natives produce anything beyond the corn and beans for their own requirements. The "national palace" is a green, clap-boarded building, housing not only the president and his little reception-room solemn with a dozen chairs in cotton shrouds, but congress, the ministry, and the "West Point of Honduras," the superintendent of which was a native youth who had spent a year or two at Chapultepec. Against it lean barefooted, anemic "soldiers" in misfit overalls, armed with musket and bayonet that overtop them in height. The main post-office of the republic is an ancient adobe hovel, in the cobwebbed recesses of which squat a few stupid fellows waiting for the mule-back mail-train to arrive that they may lock up in preparation for beginning to look over the correspondence mañana. It is not the custom to make appointments in Tegucigalpa. If one resident desires the presence of another at dinner, or some less excusable function, he wanders out just before the hour set until he picks up his guest somewhere. By night the town is doubly dead. The shops put up their wooden shutters at dusk, the more energetic inhabitants wander a while about the cobbled streets, dim-lighted here and there by arc-lights, the cathedral bells jangle at intervals like suspended pieces of scrap-iron, arousing a chorus of barking dogs, and a night in which two blankets are comfortable settles down over all the mountainous, moon-flooded region. There is not even the imitation of a theater, the plaza concert on Sunday evenings, in which the two sexes wander past each other in opposite directions for an hour or two, being the only fixed recreation. A man of infinite patience, or who had grown old and weary of doing, might find Tegucigalpa agreeable; but it would soon pall on the man still imbued with living desires.