chiefly notable for
the breadth and the squareness of the jaws. He had merry blue eyes, and
his crown--he was holding his battered Derby hat in his hand--was as
bare as a billiard ball. Below timber-line, as he himself expressed it,
he had a brush of close-cut sandy-red hair. I had encountered both of
these men when I first came to Morelia, and during two or three weeks I
had seen a good deal of them, for we had met daily at our meals; and the
more that I had seen of them the better was I disposed to like them. The
tall man was Rayburn, a civil engineer in charge of construction on the
advanced line of the new railway; the other was Young, the lost-freight
agent of the railroad company--whose duty, for which his keen quickness
peculiarly well fitted him, was that of looking up freight which had
gone astray in transit. Both of those men had lived long in rough and
dangerous regions, and both--as I then instinctively believed, and as I
came later to know fully--were as true and as stanch and as brave as
ever men could be.

What they were laughing at, there in the court-yard, was an
extraordinary performance in which the performers were Pablo and El
Sabio. With a grin all over the parts of his face not engaged in the
operation of his mouth-organ, Pablo was rendering on that instrument a
highly Mexicanized version of one of the airs from _Pinafore_ that he
had just acquired from hearing Young whistle it. To this music, with a
most pained yet determined expression, the Wise One was lifting his feet
and swaying his body and nodding his head in a sort of accompaniment,
his movements being directed by the waving of Pablo's disengaged hand.
The long ears of this unfortunate little donkey wagged in remonstrance
against the unreasonable motions demanded of his unlucky legs, and every
now and then he would twitch viciously his fuzzy scrap of a tail; but
his master was inexorable, and it was not until Pablo's own desire to
laugh became so strong that he no longer could play the mouth-organ that
El Sabio was given rest. As he ended his dancing I must say that there
was on El Sabio's face as fine an expression of contempt as the face of
a donkey ever wore.

"Hello, Professor!" Young called out, as he caught sight of me, "have
you given up antiquities an' gone into th' circus business? This outfit
that you've got here will make your fortune when you get it back into
th' States. If you don't want to run it yourself, I'll run it for you