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groups, boasting of their strength and their abilities in general, and also about the size of the snakes, tigers, and lions they claimed to have met in the jungle when looking for stray goats or burros. Then they showed each other remarkable tricks — what they could do with their fingers, hands, arms, and bodies, how they could twist and contort them. Some were admired because they could turn their eyes in their sockets so that only the whites could be seen. Others told gruesome stories to the younger ones of how they had been swimming in the river and while diving had been caught by the leg by a bull alligator, and then they showed by throwing themselves on the ground and rolling about how they had freed themselves and what sort of fight they had had to go through before they found safety on the bank.
    Everybody was smoking, men, women, children. But not the girls, because the boys say that a kiss from the tobacco-stained lips of a sweet girl is the ugliest thing in love. They smoked cigarettes made by rolling black tobacco in corn leaves. Mothers with their babies at their breasts blew tobacco smoke into the babies' faces to protect them against the mosquitoes.
    The men lounged around in smaller groups, talking, laughing, boasting, and occasionally buying a bottle of beer for themselves and a lemonade for their womenfolk. They always had one eye on their women and daughters.
    With Sleigh, the pump-master, and an Indian who worked with the oilmen, I stood mid-way between the bridge and the pump, slightly nearer to the river than to the pump-master's hut. I looked towards the river, but I could see neither it nor the bridge because of the blackness of the night.
    From where I stood, by turning my eyes to the left I could see the fire of the mule-drivers' camp, where the boy at this moment was throwing coffee into the tin kettle by the fire while the men were toasting tortillas and cutting cheese and onions.
    Dim lights shimmered through the brush on the opposite bank. As the soft breeze moved the shrubs, these little flickers now appeared, now disappeared in quick succession. These were mostly lights from the huts yonder where the women were making up for the dance, but some came from the big, tropical fireflies which were everywhere about us.
    The boys sitting on the bridge at this end were still singing. Their stock of songs seemed inexhaustible, but the tunes seemed to be always the same. There were differences, though, and the Indians recognized them.
    Wherever I looked there was animation and laughter and the noise of children at play.

8
    'I tell you, they are going to cement again, and they'll do it next week,' Ignacio said importantly. He was the man who worked in the oil camp and was now standing with Sleigh and the pump-master and myself. 'How deep are you down now? ' Sleigh asked. 'About twelve hundred feet, I think.'
    At that depth there is no reason why they should cement the hole.' The pump-master, who in fact knew nothing about oil, wished to impress us with his wisdom. He had picked up a few phrases which he had heard from oilmen passing by, so he went on bravely: 'Why should they cement at twelve hundred? There are holes where they drill down to four thousand feet.'
    'You're telling me,' Ignacio said, with the firmness of an old expert. He had been working with the oilmen only about three months and his principal job had been carrying iron pipes on his shoulders. 'But, believe it or not, they are going to cement Monday or Tuesday. On that I'll bet any of you guys.'
    Garcia was still scratching his fiddle, but nobody paid any attention to his plaintive invitation to dance.
    The singing of the boys on the bridge was getting thin, as if some voices had fallen out or as if all of them had at last become tired.
    And at that moment something strange happened. I had the feeling that the air was invaded by a mysterious power which hovered over us like a huge winged beast. A kind of lethargy overcame the crowd.