"There is nothing but the place opposite," she answered.
This was a sort of mud cave, man-made and door-less, the uneven earth floor covered with excrement, human and otherwise. I returned to peer into the mat-roofed yard with piles of corn-stalks and un-threshed beans, and met the man of the house just arriving with his labor-worn burros. He was a sinewy peasant of about fifty, dressed like all country peons in shirt and tight trousers of thinnest white cotton, showing his brown skin here and there. As he hesitated to give me answer, the wife made frantic signs to him from behind the door, of which the cracks were inches wide. He caught the hint and replied to my request for lodging:
Such exorbitance! The regulation price was perhaps one. But I yielded, for it was raining, and entered, to sit down on a heap of unthreshed beans. The woman brought me a mat three feet long, evidently destined to be my bed. I was really in the family barnyard, with no end walls, chickens overhead and the burros beyond. The rain took to dripping through the mat roof, and as I turned back toward the first hut for the promised frijoles and tortillas the woman called to me to say she also could furnish me supper.
The main room of the house was about ten by ten, with mud walls five feet high, a pitched roof of some sort of grass with several holes in it. In the center of the room was a fireplace three feet high and four square, with several steaming glazed pots over a fire of _encinal_ fagots. The walls were black with soot of the smoke that partly wandered out of an irregular hole in the farther end of the room. The eight-year-old son of the family was eating corn-stalks with great gusto, tearing off the rind with his teeth and chewing the stalk as others do sugar-cane. I handed him a loaf of potosino bread and he answered a perfunctory "Gracias," but neither he nor any of the family showed any evidence of gratitude as he wolfed it. The man complained that all the corn had dried up for lack of rain. The woman set before me a bowl of "sopita," with tortillas, white cheese, and boiled whole peppers. A penniless peon traveler begged a cigarette and half my morning loaf, and went out into the night and rain to sleep in the "chapel," as the mud cave across the way was called. There several travelers had settled down for the night. A girl of seventeen or so splashed across from it to beg "a jar of water for a poor prostitute," apparently announcing her calling merely as a curious bit of information.