call the dye-rooms the "suicide-holes," where a year was death. He
saw the little patio, and his mother cooking and moiling at crude
housekeeping and finding time to caress and love him. And his father he
saw, large, big-moustached and deep-chested, kindly above all men,
who loved all men and whose heart was so large that there was love to
overflowing still left for the mother and the little muchacho playing
in the corner of the patio. In those days his name had not been Felipe
Rivera. It had been Fernandez, his father's and mother's name. Him had
they called Juan. Later, he had changed it himself, for he had found
the name of Fernandez hated by prefects of police, jefes politicos, and
rurales.

Big, hearty Joaquin Fernandez! A large place he occupied in Rivera's
visions. He had not understood at the time, but looking back he could
understand. He could see him setting type in the little printery, or
scribbling endless hasty, nervous lines on the much-cluttered desk. And
he could see the strange evenings, when workmen, coming secretly in the
dark like men who did ill deeds, met with his father and talked long
hours where he, the muchacho, lay not always asleep in the corner.

As from a remote distance he could hear Spider Hagerty saying to him:
"No layin' down at the start. Them's instructions. Take a beatin' and
earn your dough."

Ten minutes had passed, and he still sat in his corner. There were no
signs of Danny, who was evidently playing the trick to the limit.

But more visions burned before the eye of Rivera's memory. The strike,
or, rather, the lockout, because the workers of Rio Blanco had helped
their striking brothers of Puebla. The hunger, the expeditions in the
hills for berries, the roots and herbs that all ate and that twisted and
pained the stomachs of all of them. And then, the nightmare; the waste
of ground before the company's store; the thousands of starving workers;
General Rosalio Martinez and the soldiers of Porfirio Diaz, and the
death-spitting rifles that seemed never to cease spitting, while the
workers' wrongs were washed and washed again in their own blood. And
that night! He saw the flat cars, piled high with the bodies of the
slain, consigned to Vera Cruz, food for the sharks of the bay. Again
he crawled over the grisly heaps, seeking and finding, stripped
and mangled, his father and his mother. His mother he especially
remembered--only her face projecting, her body burdened by the weight