a dog with its tail between its
legs," Quail remarked.

"It ain't that, I guess. They don't give a whoop for the other side
either."

"But why should they like us?"

They spoke no more.

Presently they reached the city square and stopped in front of an
octagonal, rough, massive church, reminiscent of the colonial period.
At one time the square must have been a garden, judging from the bare
stunted orange trees planted between iron and wooden benches. The
sonorous, joyful bells rang again. From within the church, the honeyed
voices of a female chorus rose melancholy and grave. To the strains of
a guitar, the young girls of the town sang the "Mysteries."

"What's the fiesta, lady?" Venancio asked of an old woman who was
running toward the church.

"The Sacred Heart of Jesus!" answered the pious woman, panting.

They remembered that one year ago they had captured Zacatecas. They
grew sadder still.

Juchipila, like the other towns they had passed through on their way
from Tepic, by way of Jalisco, Aguascalientes and Zacatecas, was in
ruins. The black trail of the incendiaries showed in the roofless
houses, in the burnt arcades. Almost all the houses were closed, yet,
here and there, those still open offered, in ironic contrast, portals
gaunt and bare as the white skeletons of horses scattered over the
roads. The terrible pangs of hunger seemed to speak from every face;
hunger on every dusty cheek, in their dusty countenances; in the hectic
flame of their eyes, which, when they met a soldier, blazed with
hatred. In vain the soldiers scoured the streets in search of food,
biting their lips in anger. A single lunchroom was open; at once they
filled it. No beans, no tortillas, only chili and tomato sauce. In vain
the officers showed their pocketbooks stuffed with bills or used
threats:

"Yea, you've got papers all right! That's all you've brought! Try and
eat them, will you?" said the owner, an insolent old shrew with an
enormous scar on her cheek, who told them she had already lain with a
dead man, "to cure her from ever feeling frightened again."

Despite the melancholy and desolation of the town, while the women sang
in the church, birds sang in the foliage, and the thrushes piped their
lyrical strain on the withered branches of the orange trees.

VI

Demetrio Macias' wife, mad with joy, rushed along the trail to meet
him, leading a child by the hand. An absence of almost two years!

They embraced each