CHAPTER VIII

THE LAND OF BULLET-HOLES

Ouanaminthe is the Haitian “creole” name for a town which the Spaniards founded under the more euphonious title of Juana Mendez. It is the eastern frontier station for those who travel overland by the northern route from Haiti to Santo Domingo. We might have been stranded there indefinitely but for the already familiar kindness of our fellow-countrymen in uniform who are scattered throughout the negro republic. Public conveyances are unknown in Ouanaminthe. Strangers are more than rare, and the natives trust to their own broad, hoof-like feet. Walking is all very well for a lone bachelor with no other cares than a half-filled knapsack. But with a wife to consider, the long trail loses something of its primitive simplicity; moreover there sat our baggage staring us in the face with a contrite, don’t-abandon-me air. In what would otherwise have been our sad predicament, Captain Verner, commanding the gendarmérie of Ouanaminthe, came to our rescue most delicately with the assertion that he had long been planning to run over to Monte Cristi on a pressing matter of business.

The captain’s Ford—his own, be it noted in passing, lest some committee of investigation prick up its ears—was soon swimming the frontier river Massacre with that amphibian ease which the adaptable “flivver” quickly acquires in the often bridgeless West Indies. The change from one civilization to another—or should I call them two attempts toward civilization?—was as sudden, as astonishingly abrupt, as the dash through the apparently unfordable stream. Dajabón, strewn from the sandy crest of the eastern bank to the arid plains beyond, reminded us at once of Cuba; to my own mind it brought back the memory of hundreds of Spanish-American towns scattered down the western hemisphere from the Rio Grande to Patagonia. With one slight exception the island of Santo Domingo is the only one in the New World that is divided between two nationalities; it is the only one on earth, unless my geography be at fault, where the rank and file speak two different languages. Yet the shallow Massacre is as definite a dividing line as though it were a hundred leagues of sea.

Unlike the Haitian shacks behind us, the dwellings of Dajabón were almost habitable, even to the exacting Northern point of view. Instead of tattered and ludicrously patched negroes of bovine temperament lolling in the shade of as ragged hovels of palm-leaves and jungle rubbish, comparatively well-dressed men and women, ranging in complexion from light brown to pale yellow, sat in chairs on projecting verandas or leaned on their elbows in open windows, staring with that fixed attention which makes the most hardened stranger self-conscious in Spanish-America, yet which, contrasted with the vacant black faces of Haiti, was an evidence at least of human intelligence and curiosity. The village girls, decked out in their Sunday-afternoon best, were often attractive in appearance, some undeniably pretty, qualities which only an observer of African ancestry could by any stretch of generosity grant to the belles of the Haitian _bourgs_ behind us.

Even the change in landscape was striking. Whether the Spaniard colonized by choice those regions which remind him of the dry and rarely shaded plains of his own Castille and Aragón, or because he makes way with a forest wherever he sees one, he is more apt than not to be surrounded by bare, brown, semi-arid vistas. Haiti had, on the whole, been densely wooded; luxuriant vegetation, plentifully watered, spread away on every hand. The great plain that stretched out before us beyond Dajabón was almost treeless; except for a scattering of withered, thorny bushes, there was scarcely a growing thing. The rainfall that had been so frequent in the land of the blacks behind us seemed not to have crossed the frontier in months. In contrast to _caco_-impoverished Haiti, large herds of cattle wandered about the brown immensity, or huddled in the rare pretenses of shade; but what they found to feed on was a mystery, for there was nothing in the scarce, scanty patches of sun-burned herbage that could have been dignified with the name of grass. Even where something resembling a forest appeared farther on it turned out to be a dismal wilderness of dwarf trees with spiny trunks and savage thorny branches without a suggestion of undergrowth or ground plants beneath them. Dead, flat, monotonous, made doubly mournful by the occasional moan of a wild dove, a more dreary, uninspiring landscape it would be hard to imagine; the vista that spread away as far as the eye could see seemed wholly uninviting to human habitation.

It must be an unpromising region, however, that does not produce at least its crop of mankind. Clusters of thrown-together huts, little less miserable in these rural districts, it must be admitted, than those of Haiti, jolted past us now and then, their swarms of stark-naked children of eight, ten, and even twelve years of age scampering out across the broken, sun-hardened ground to see us pass. Yet in one respect at least even these denizens of the wilderness were superior to their Haitian prototypes—they really spoke their native language. Familiar as we had both been for years with French, it was rare indeed that we got more than the general drift of a conversation in Haitian “creole.” The most uneducated _dominicano_, on the other hand, spoke a Spanish almost as clear and precise as that heard in the streets of Madrid. There must be something enduring, something that appeals to the most uncouth tongue, in the Castilian language. Hear it where you will, in all the broad expanse of Central and South America, in the former Spanish colonies of the West Indies, from the lips of Indians, negroes, _mestizos_, or the Jews of the Near East, banished from Spain centuries ago, with minor variations of pronunciation and enriching of vocabulary from the tongues it has supplanted, it retains almost its original purity. What a hybrid of incomprehensible noises French, on the other hand, becomes in the mouths of slaves and savages we had all too often had impressed upon us in Haiti, and were due to have the lesson repeated in the French islands of the Lesser Antilles. Even our own English cannot stand the wear and tear of isolation and slovenly vocal processes with anything like the success of the Castilian. The speech of Canada and of Barbados, closely as those two lands are linked to the same mother country, seem almost two distinct languages. But if the Dominicans spoke their language more purely, their voices had none of the soft, almost musical tones of the negroes beyond the Massacre. There was a brittle, metallic, nerve-jarring twang to their speech that was almost as unpleasant as the high-pitched chatter of Cuban women.

If we noted all these differences between the two divisions of the island, there was another that impressed us far more forcibly at the moment. In all our jolting over the roads of Haiti, good, bad, and unspeakable, we had never once been delayed by so much as a puncture. In the first mile out of Dajabón we were favored with four separate and distinct blow-outs. The twenty-eight miles between the frontier and Monte Cristi—for it is best to hear the worst at once—netted no fewer than ten!

It was shortly after the fifth, if my memory is not failing, that the open plain gave way to a thorn-bristling wilderness through which had been cut a roadway a generous twenty feet wide—_shortly_ after certainly, otherwise the sixth blow-out would have intervened. I use the term roadway advisedly, for road there was really none. The Dominican scorns the building of highways as thoroughly as do any of his cousins of Spanish descent. With American intervention he was forced, much against his will and better judgment, to divert a certain amount of public moneys and labor to making wheeled communication between his various provinces possible. But though you can drive an unbridled horse along any open space, you cannot choose the path he shall make within it. Wide as it was, the roadway was an unbroken expanse of deeply cracked and thoroughly churned brown mud, sun-burned to the consistency of broken rock. Along this the first traveler after the long forgotten rains had squirmed and waded his way where the mud was shallowest, with the result that the only semblance to a road wandered back and forth across the misshapen roadway like a Spanish “river” in its ludicrously over-ample bed.

Here and there we were forced to crawl along the extreme edge of one or the other of the bristling walls of vegetation; frequently the only passable trail left the roadway entirely and squirmed off through the spiny forest, the thorny branches whipping us in the faces. Huge clumps of organ cactus and others of the same family forced us to make precarious detours. At the top of a faint rise we sighted the “Morro” of Monte Cristi, a great bulking rectangular hill that guides the mariner both by land and sea to the most western port of Santo Domingo. Our hopes began slowly to revive when—“Groughung!” the sixth mishap befell us—or was it the seventh? I remember that the eighth overtook us at the bottom of the rise, when both daylight and our patches were giving out. The ninth found us in total darkness, and disclosed the fact that there was not a match on board. The lamps of the car had ceased to function months before; one does not Ford it by night in the island of Santo Domingo except upon extreme provocation. A hut discovered back in the bush was likewise matchless, but the supper fire on the ground beside it still had a few glowing embers. While Rachel held the blaze of one of those dried hollow reeds that do duty as torches in Santo Domingo as near us as was prudent, we improvised a patch that would have caused an experienced chauffeur to gasp with astonishment. Each rustling of the thorny brush about us drew our fixed attention. There are bandits in Santo Domingo as well as in Haiti, and they have far less reputation for making speed to the rear. The captain carried a revolver, an American Marine being equally at home in either of the island republics. But the danger of international complications had prevented his black gendarme assistant from bringing with him the rifle that might be badly needed. My visions of losing a congenial companion were vastly enhanced once when a crashing in the bushes caused us to whirl about on the defensive. A stray cow ambled past us and away into the black night.

With the tenth mishap, lightless and patchless, we lost the final remnants of patience and forced our sorry steed to hobble along on three feet. The road had a pleasant little way of eluding us when least expected, and a dozen times within the next hour we brought up against the forest wall, finding our way again only by the sense of touch. Then at last appeared a flicker of light. But it was only the hamlet on the bank of the River Yaque, across which we must be ferried on what looked in the darkness like the top of a soap-box. Fortunately it takes little to float a Ford. Our crippled charger staggered up the steep bank beyond this principal stream of northern Santo Domingo, and a half hour later we rattled into the considerable town of Monte Cristi.

Its streets were as wide as the hilltop roadway behind us, but like it they had only reached the first stage of development. Worst of all we were forced to run the full length of nearly every one of them in the vain quest of some suggestion of hostelry. Our predicament would have been one to bring salt tears to the most hardened eyes but for the saving grace of all the island of Santo Domingo—our own people in uniform. Barely had we discovered the commander-in-chief of Monte Cristi, a Marine captain bearing the name of one of our early and illustrious Presidents, than he broke all records in hospitality within our own experience by turning his entire house over to us. We were never more firmly convinced of the wisdom of American intervention in Santo Domingo than at the end of that explosive day.

* * * * *

The otherwise dark and deserted town was gathered in its best starched attire in the place where any Spanish-American town would naturally be on a Sunday evening—in the central plaza. This, to begin with, was strikingly unlike the bare open squares of Haiti, with their unfailing tribune-and-palm-tree “patrie.” First of all, it was well paved, an assertion that could not be made of any other spot in town. An elaborate iron fence surrounded it, comfortable benches were ranged about it, trees and flowering shrubs shaded it by day and decorated it by night, the only public lights in town cast an unwonted brilliancy upon the promenading populace, circling slowly round and round the square, the two sexes in opposite directions, their voices and footsteps half drowning the not too successful efforts of a group of misfitted males in the center of the plaza to produce musical sounds. It was as typically Spanish a scene as the deserted barren _place_, with the weird beating of tomtoms floating across it, is indigenous to the republic of Haiti.

It was not until morning, however, that we caught full sight of the chief feature of the plaza and the pride of Monte Cristi. By daylight a monument we had only vaguely sensed in the night stood forth in all its dubious beauty. In the center of the now deserted plaza rose a near replica of the Eiffel Tower, its open-work steel frame crowned by a large four-faced clock some fifty feet above our dizzy heads. Well might the Monte Cristians pride themselves on a feature quite unique among the plazas of the world.

From this clock tower hangs a tale that is too suggestive of Dominican character to be passed over in silence. Some years ago, before the intrusive Americans came to put an end to the national sport, a candidate for the Dominican Congress came parading his candidacy about the far corners of the country. In each town he promised, in return for their aid in seating him in the august assembly, that the citizens should have federal funds for whatever was most lacking to their civic happiness. Monte Cristi, being farthest from the cynical capital of any community in Santo Domingo, took the politician seriously. The town put its curly heads together and decided that what it most wanted was—not a real school building to take the place of the rented hut in which its children fail to learn the rudiments of the three R’s, nor yet pavements for some of the sandhills that are disguised under the name of streets. What it felt the need of more than anything else was a town clock that would cast envy on all its rivals for many miles around. The politician approved the choice so thoroughly that he advised the opening of negotiations for its purchase at once, without waiting for the mere formality of congressional sanction. In due time the monstrosity was erected. But for some reason the newly elected congressman’s influence with his fellow-members was not so paramount as his faithful supporters had been led to believe. Some of them still contend that he did actually introduce a resolution to provide the noble and patriotic pueblo of Monte Cristi with a prime necessity in the shape of a community time-piece; if so the bill died in committee, unattended by priest or physician. For months Monte Cristi bombarded the far-off capital with doleful petitions, until at length, with the sudden coming of the Americans, congress itself succumbed, and the two thousand or so good citizens of the hapless town found themselves face to face with a document—bearing a foreign place of issue at that, caramba!—reading succinctly:

“To one clock and tower, Dr........$16,000 _Please Remit_”

To cap the climax, the ridiculous Americans who had taken in charge the revenues of the country brought with them the absurd doctrine that municipalities should pay their bills. Years have passed since the successful politician visited the northwest corner of the country, yet Monte Cristi is only beginning to crawl from beneath its appalling clock tower, financially speaking, and to catch its breath again after relief from so oppressive a burden. Small wonder that her sand-hill streets are unpaved and that her children still crowd into a rented hovel to glean the rudiments of learning.

But the history of the famous clock tower does not end there. Those who glance at the top-heavy structure from the south are struck by a jagged hole just above the face of the dial, midway between the XII and the I. It is so obviously a bullet-hole that the observer could not fail to show surprise were it not that bullet-holes are as universal in Santo Domingo as fighting cocks. Thereby hangs another tale.

In the early days of American occupation the choice of commanders of the _Guardia Nacional_ detachment in Monte Cristi was not always happy. It was natural, too, that a group of marine officers, bubbling over with youth, sentenced to pass month after month in a somnolent Dominican village, should have found it difficult to devise fitting amusement for their long leisure hours. Pastimes naturally reduced themselves to the exchange of poker chips and the consumption of certain beverages supposedly taboo in all American circles and doubly so in the Marine Corps. The power of Dominican joy-water to produce hilarity is far-famed. It came to be the custom of the winning card player to express his exuberance by drawing his automatic and firing several shots over his head. This means of expression would have been startling enough to the disarmed Dominicans had the games been played in the open air with the sun above the horizon. But the rendezvous was naturally within doors, usually in the dwelling of the commander, and the climax was commonly reached at an hour when all reputable natives were wrapped in slumber. The sheet-iron roof that sheltered us during our night in Monte Cristi corroborated the testimony of the inhabitants that they had frequently sprung from their beds convinced that yet another revolution was upon them.

One night a difference of opinion arose among the players as to the hour that should be set for the cashing in of chips. The commander offered to settle the problem in an equitable manner. Stepping to the door, he raised his automatic toward the famous $16,000 clock and fired. The decision was made; the game ended at twelve:thirty. It is not particularly strange under the circumstances that the inhabitants of Monte Cristi are not extraordinarily fond of Americans or of marine occupation.

* * * * *

The mail coach—in real life the inevitable Ford—left Monte Cristi the morning after our arrival, obviating the necessity of wiring to Santiago for a private car. The fare was within reason, as such things go in the West Indies—sixteen dollars for a journey of some eighty miles—and despite the pessimistic prophecies of our host we had the back seat to ourselves the entire distance. Our driver, of dull-brown hue, was of the same quick, nervous temperament as his Cuban cousins, and scurried away at thirty miles an hour over “roads” which few American chauffeurs would venture along at ten. Yet he was surprisingly successful in avoiding undue jolts; so often had he driven this incredibly rough-and-tumble route that he knew exactly when and where to slow up for each dry _arroyo_, to dodge protruding boulders or dangerous sand beds, to drop from one level to another without cracking a spring or an axle. The machine was innocent of muffler, hence it needed no horn, and as an official conveyance it yielded the road to no one, except the few placid carts whose safety lay in their massiveness.

Many miles of the journey were sandy barren wastes producing only dismal thorn-bristling dwarf forests. Every now and then we dodged from one wide caricature of a road to another still more choppy and rock-strewn; occasionally we found a mile or two of tolerable highway. The scarcity of travelers was in striking contrast to Haiti. The few people we met were never on foot, but in clumsy carts or astride gaunt, but hardy, little horses. Houses of woven palm-leaves, on bare, reddish, hard soil sheltered the poorer inhabitants; the better-to-do built their dwellings of split palm trunks that had the appearance of clapboards. Villages were rare, and isolated houses wholly lacking. Outdoor mud ovens on stilts, with rude thatched roofs over them, adorned nearly every back or side yard. At each village we halted before a roughly constructed post office to exchange mailbags with a postmaster who in the majority of cases showed no visible negro strain. Pure white inhabitants were frequent in the larger pueblos; full-blooded African types extremely rare. Santo Domingo has been called a mulatto country; we found it more nearly a land of quadroons.

What even the sparse population lived on was not apparent, for almost nowhere were people working in the fields, and the towns seemed to be chiefly inhabited by fairly well-dressed loafers, or at best by lolling shop-keepers. Probably they existed by selling things to one another. The stocks of the over-numerous shops were amply supplied with bottled goods, but with comparatively little else, and that chiefly tinned food from the United States. No old sugar kettles, no ruined French estates, no negro women in broad straw hats or slippers flapping with the gait of their donkeys, no improvised markets or clamoring beggars along the way—none of the familiar things of Haiti were in evidence, except the fighting cocks. Such horsemen as we passed rode in well upholstered saddles, doubly softened by the Spanish-American _pellon_, or shaggy saddle rug. The women accompanying them clung uncomfortably to clumsy side-saddles, and were dressed in far more style than their Haitian prototypes, pink gowns being most in favor, and in place of the loose slippers the majority wore shoes elaborate enough to satisfy a New York shop-girl. Cemeteries at the edge of each town were forests of wooden crosses, contrasting with the coffin-shaped cement tombs of Haiti.

Guayovin, a town of considerable size and noted for its revolutionary history, the scattered hamlet of Laguna Salada, the larger village of Esperanza, one pueblo after another was the same blurred vista of wide, sandy streets, of open shop fronts and gaping inhabitants. We soon detected a surly attitude toward Americans, a sullen, passive resentment that recalled the attitude of Colombia as I had known it eight years before. There was more superficial courtesy than in our own brusk and hurried land; the Dominican, like all our neighbors to the southward, cultivates an exterior polish. But with the exception of a few who went out of their way to demonstrate their pro-American sentiments, to express themselves as far more pleased with foreign occupation than with the continual threat of revolution, the attitude of silent protest was everywhere in the air.

At the end of fifty kilometers, in which we had forded only one pathetic little stream, the landscape changed somewhat for the better, though at the same time the “road” became even more atrocious. Hitherto the only beauty in the scene had been a pretty little flowering cactus bush, like an inverted candelabra, and the soft velvety colors of the barren brown vistas. Now the thorny vegetation, the chaparral, and the cactus gave way to clumps of bamboo, to towering palms, and other trees of full stature, while corn and beans began to clothe the still deadly-dry soil. High hills had arisen close on the left, higher ones farther off to the right; then ahead appeared beautiful labyrinths of deep-blue mountains, range after range piled up one behind the other in amphitheatrical formation, culminating in the cloud-coiffed peak of Tino, some ten thousand feet above the sea and the highest point in the West Indies.

Navarrete, strung along the beginning of an excellent highway that was to continue, except for two unfinished bridges, to Santiago, boasted real houses, some of palm trunks, most of them of genuine lumber with more corrugated iron than thatched roofs, some of their walls of faded pink, green, or yellow, many of them frankly unpainted. A considerable commercial activity occupied its inhabitants. Beyond, the country grew still greener, with groves of royal palms waving their ostrich plumes with the dignified leisureliness of the tropics, and the highway began to undulate, or, as it seemed to us behind our over-eager chauffeur, to pitch and roll, over low foot-hills. We picked up a rusty little railroad on the left, farther on a power line and a dozen telegraph wires striding over hill and dale, raced at illegal speed through Villa Gonzalez, and entered a still more verdant region of vegetable gardens in fertile black soil. Then all at once we topped a rise from which spread out all the splendid green valley of Yaque, Santiago de los Caballeros piled up a sloping high ground a couple of miles away, with mountains that had grown to imposing height still far distant to the right. A truck-load of marines, monopolizing the right of way in the innocently obstructive manner we had often seen in France, blocked our progress for a time; then we swung past the inevitable shaded plaza of all Spanish-American towns, and drew up with a snort at the Santiago post office just as the cathedral clock was striking the hour of three.

* * * * *

Before we had time even to set foot in Santiago we were greeted by my old friend “Lieutenant Long” of Canal Zone police fame, who had already put the town in a proper mood for our reception. Since the days when we had pursued felons together along the ten-mile strip of Panamanian jungle the erstwhile lieutenant, now more fittingly known as “Big George,” had added steadily to his laurels as a good and true servant of mankind. From the defelonized banks of the canal to the command of the sleuths of Porto Rico had been a natural step, and when he had detected everything worth detecting in our West Indian isle, and fathered a company of the 17th Infantry during the late international misunderstanding, “Big George” accepted the Augean task of initiating the Dominicans into the mysteries of their new American-sired land tax.

Considerably more than four hundred years ago, when the redskin north of the Rio Grande had yet to scalp his initial pale face, there was founded in the fertile valley of the Yaque the first of the many Santiagos that to-day dot the map of more than half the western hemisphere. Thirty Spanish gentlemen, as the word was understood in those roistering days, _hidalgos_ who had followed on the heels of Columbus, were the original settlers, and because of their noble birth they were permitted by royal decree to call their new home by the name it still officially bears,—Santiago de los Caballeros. Although the present inhabitants of the aristocratic old town by no means all boast themselves “gentlemen” either in the _conquistador_ or the modern sense of the term, some of the leading families can trace their ancestry in unbroken line from those old Spanish hidalgos. Many of these descendants of fifteenth century grandees still retain the armor, swords, and other quaint warlike gear of their ancestors. A few have even kept their Caucasian blood pure through all the generations and frequent disasters of that long four hundred years, but the vast majority of them give greater or less evidence of African graftings on the family tree. The Cibao, as the northern half of Santo Domingo is called, is the region in which the Spaniards first found in any quantity the gold they came a-seeking, and gentlemanly Santiago has ever been its principal city. Twice destroyed by earthquakes, like so many cities of the West Indies, sacked by pirates and invaders more times than it cares to remember, it has persisted through all its mishaps.

But in spite of its flying start Santiago has by no means kept pace with many a parvenu in the New World. Barely can it muster twenty thousand inhabitants, and in progress and industry it has drifted but slowly down the stream of time. Revolutions have been its chief setback, for the innumerable civil wars that have decimated the population of the republic ever since it asserted its freedom from the Spanish crown have almost invariably centered about the city of caballeros. A hundred Spanish-American towns can duplicate its every feature. About the invariable central plaza, with its shaded benches, diagonal walks, and evening promenaders, stand the bulking, weather-peeled cathedral with its constantly thumping, tin-voiced bells, the _casa consistorial_ where the municipal council dawdles through its weekly meetings, the wide open yet exclusive clubs, and the residences of the most ancient families, their lower stories occupied by shops and cafés. In contrast to this proudly kept square the wide, right-angled streets that radiate from it are either congenitally innocent of paving or littered with the remnants of what may long ago have been cobbled driveways. As in all Spanish-America the lack of civic team-work is shown in the sidewalks; which are high, low, ludicrously narrow, or lacking entirely, according to the personal whim of each householder, and rather family porches than public rights of way. Its houses, mostly of one story, never higher than two, are something more than half of wood, the remainder being adobe or baked-mud structures that some time in the remote past had their façades daubed with whitewash or scantily painted in various bright colors. The cathedral, the municipal building, many a private residence, our very hotel room were speckled with bullet-holes more or less diligently patched, corroborating the verbal evidence of Santiago’s revolutionary activities. There is a faint reminder of the Moors in the tendency for each trade to monopolize one street to the exclusion of the others. A dozen barbershops may be found in a single block, cafés cluster together, drygoods shops with their languid male clerks shoulder one another with a certain degree of leisurely, unindividualistic aggressiveness. Farther out, the unkempt streets dwindle away between lop-shouldered little huts that seem to need the supporting mutual assistance shared by their neighbors nearer the center of town.

There is not a street car in all the island of Santo Domingo, or Haiti, as you choose to call it. Dingy, wretched old carriages, their horses only a trifle less gaunt and ungroomed than those of Port au Prince, loiter about a corner of the plaza, behind the cathedral, shrieking their pleas at every possible fare who passes within their field of vision. Automobiles are not unknown, but they have not yet invaded Santiago in force. The inevitable venders of lottery tickets, which in Santo Domingo are of municipal rather than national issue and resemble the handbills of some itinerant family of barn-stormers, pester the passer-by every few yards with spurious promises of sudden fortune. In the cathedral the visitor finds himself face to face at every step with admonitions that women must have their heads covered and that worshipers shall not spit on the floor. The first command is universally recognized, if only by the spreading of a handkerchief over the frizzled tresses, but the latter is by no means so faithfully obeyed. If there is anything whatever individualistic about St. James of the Gentlemen that distinguishes it from its countless cousins below the Rio Grande, it is the stars and stripes that wave above the ancient fortress overlooking the placid River Yaque, and the groups of American marines who come now and then striding down its untended streets.

The average santiagueño reaches the dignity of clothes somewhat late in life. Naked black or brown babies adorn every block, the sight of a plump boy of five taking his constitutional dressed in a pair of sandals, a bright red hat, and a magnificent expression of unconcern attracts the attention of no one except strangers. Girls show the prudery of their sex somewhat earlier in life, but many a boy learns to smoke cigarettes, and even long black cigars, before he submits to the inconvenience of his first garment. It may be this sartorial freedom of his earlier life that makes the Santiago male prone to sport a costume that belies his years. Youths of sixteen, eighteen, and some one might easily suspect of being twenty, display an expanse of brown legs between their tight knee-breeches and short socks that makes their precocious tendency to frequent cafés, consume fiery drinks and man-size cigars, and _enamorar las muchachas_ doubly striking. They are intelligent youths, on the whole, compared with their Haitian neighbors, with a quick wit to catch a political argument or the mysteries of a mechanical contrivance, though they have the tendency of all their mixed race to slow down in their mental processes soon after reaching what with us would be early manhood. _La juventud_ of Santo Domingo is beginning to look with slightly less scorn upon the use of the hands as a means of livelihood, an improvement which may be largely credited to American occupation, not so much through precept and example as by the reduction in political sinecures and the institution of genuine examinations for candidates to government office.

In character, as in physical aspect, Santiago is true to type. The outward forms of politeness are diligently cultivated; actual, physical consideration for the comfort or convenience of others is conspicuous by its scarcity. The same man who raises his hat to and shakes hands with his neighbor ten times a day shows no hesitancy in maintaining any species of nuisance, from a bevy of fighting cocks to a braying jackass, against the peace and happiness of that same neighbor, nor in hugging a house-wall when it is his place to take to the gutter. A haughtiness of demeanor, an over-developed personal pride that it would be difficult to find real reason for, burden all except the most poverty-stricken class. Amid the medley of tints that make up the population the casual observer might conclude that the existence of a color-line would be out of the question in Santiago. As he dips beneath the surface, however, he finds a very decided one, nay, several, dividing the population not into two, but into three or four social strata, though the lines of demarkation are neither as distinct nor as adamant as with us. Thus one of the tile-floored clubs on the central plaza, the chair-forested parlor of which stands ostensibly wide open, admits no member whose ancestry has not been unbrokenly Caucasian, while another across the square welcomes neither pure whites nor full-blooded Africans. An amusing feature of this club exclusiveness is that the first society, after what is said to have been violent debate, declined to admit American members, as a protest against “the unwarranted interference by superior force in our national affairs.” In retaliation, or rather, in supreme indifference to this attitude, the forces of occupation have acquired the premises next door and take no back seat to the Dominicans in the matter of exclusiveness. It may be the merest coincidence that whenever a dance is given in the American clubrooms a still more blatant orchestra, seated close up against the thin partition between the two social rendezvous, furnishes the inspiration for a similar recreation.

The principal business of Santiago, if one may judge by the frequent warehouse doors from which issues the acrid smell of sweating tobacco, is the buying and selling of the narcotic weed. It comes in great bales, wrapped in _yagua_, or the thick, leathern leaf-stem of the royal palm, of which each tree sheds one a month and which is turned to such a variety of uses throughout the West Indies. Women and boys are constantly picking these bales apart and strewing their contents about in various heaps, to just what purpose is not apparent to the layman, for they always end by bundling them up again in the self-same _yagua_, in which dusky draymen carry them off once more to parts unknown. A considerable amount of the stuff is consumed locally, however, for Santiago boasts one large cigar factory and a number of small ones, ranging down to one-room hovels in which the daily output could probably be contained within two boxes—were it not the custom in Santo Domingo simply to tie them in bundles.

The smoker must conduct himself with circumspection in American-governed Santo Domingo. Each and every cigar is wrapped round not only with the usual banded trademark, but also with a revenue stamp. Now beware that you do not indulge that all but universal American habit of removing the band before lighting the cigar. In Santo Domingo it is unlawful to withdraw this proof of legal origin until the weed has been “partially consumed,” and the official expert ruling on that phrase is that the clipping off of the consumer’s end does not constitute even partial consumption, which only the burning of a certain portion of the customarily, opposite extremity, accomplishes. Furthermore, when at last you do venture to remove the decoration, do not on any account fail to mutilate it beyond all semblance to its original state. If you are detected in the perpetration of either of the unlawful acts above specified, no power can save you from falling into the hands of “Mac,” who sits in the same office with “Big George”—whenever one or both of them are not pursuing similar malefactors in another corner of the Cibao—facing the charge of unlawfully, wilfully, and maliciously violating Article 12 of the Internal Revenue Law of the sovereign República Dominicana, and there is no more certain road to the prisoner’s dock.

But I am getting ahead of my story. “Mac” will make his official entry all in due season. What I started to explain was why one may frequently behold an elephantine Dominican market woman, often with a brood of piccaninnies half concealed in the folds of her ample skirt, parading down the street with the air of a New York clubman in spite of the bushel or two of yams or plantains on her head, puffing haughtily at a cigar the band of which falsely suggests that she has recently squandered a dollar bill with her tobacconist. Indeed, many an over-cautious Dominican avoids all possibility of falling into the net by smoking serenely on through band, stamp, and all, which, to tell the truth, does not particularly depreciate the aroma of the average native cigar.

There is sound basis for Article 12. In the good old days when there were no battalions of marines to interfere with the national sport of Santo Domingo the stamp tax was already in force, and the consumption of cigars was almost what it is to-day; yet for some occult reason it scarcely produced a tenth of its present revenue. First of all there were the “chivo” cigars,—_chivo_ meaning not merely goat but something corresponding to our word “graft” in the Spanish West Indies—which never made any pretense of bearing a stamp. Some of them were made secretly; a veritable pillar of the social structure of Santo Domingo was discovered to be operating a clandestine cigar-factory long after the Americans took up this particular bit of the white man’s burden. Others were privately placed on the market by legitimate manufacturers, who supplied a certain percentage of legal stock also. A third scheme was to fill the pockets of the native inspector with a choice brand and advise him to forget the matter; still another alternative was to buy the stamps at a bargain from some revenue official who was hard pressed for ready cash. But the favorite means of avoiding contributions to the wily politicians in the capital was simplicity itself. A cigar-maker purchased a hundred revenue stamps and wrapped them about his first hundred cigars. His retailer, who might be himself, his wife, his cousin, or at least his _compadre_, greeted the purchaser with a smiling countenance. “Cigars? Why certainly. Try these. _Cómo va la señora hoy?_ _Y los niños?_ Curious exhibition that fourth pair of cocks gave on Sunday, _verdad?_” Bargains are not struck hastily in Santo Domingo. By the time the transaction was completed the retailer had ample opportunity idly to slip the bands off the cigars and drop them into his counter drawer. The purchaser made no protest, even if he noticed the manipulation, for he was buying cigars, not revenue stamps. It is vouched for that the same band saw continual service in the old days for a year or two. But it is a careless smoker to-day who ventures to thrust a cigar into his pocket without making sure that its proof of legality is intact.

* * * * *

“Big George” arranged that we should spend the first Sunday after our arrival in the most typical Dominican style of celebration,—the partaking of _lechón asado_. His choice of scene for the celebration, too, was particularly happy. An hour’s easy jog from town—easy because the saddle-horses of Santo Domingo, like those of Cuba, are all “gaited,” that is, gifted with a singlefoot pace that makes them as comfortable seats as any rocking-chair—brought us to the estate of Jaragua, the exact site of the first founding of Santiago by the Castilian _hidalgos_. It was the first earthquake that caused them to transfer it from this heart of the valley to the bluff overlooking the Yaque. The ruins of an old brick-and-stone church, of a water reservoir or community bath, and long lines of stones embedded in the ground marking the remnants of cobbled streets and house walls, are half covered with the brush and jungle-grass of a modern hog farm. Magnificent royal palms rise from what were once private family nooks; immense tropical trees spread over former parlors more charming roofs than their original coverings of thatch; the pigs frequently root up ancient coins that may long ago have jingled in Columbus’ own pocket.

Under the dense, capacious shade of a fatherly old mango-tree sat a negro peon, slowly turning round and round over a fire of specially chosen, aromatic fagots a suckling pig, or _lechón_, spitted on a long bamboo pole. In the outdoor kitchen of the rambling, one-story, tile-roofed, delightful old Spanish country house a group of ebony servants of both sexes and all ages were preparing a dozen other native dishes the mere aroma of which made a hungry man withdraw to leeward and await the summons with what patience he could muster. Our host and his family, with just enough African tinge to their ancestry to make their hair curl, hurried hither and yon, striving to minister to our already perfect comfort. There is no more genuine hospitality than that of the higher class _hacendados_ of rural Latin-America, once they have cast aside the mixture of shyness and rather oppressive dignity in which they commonly wrap themselves before strangers.

In due leisurely season the chief victim of the day’s feast, his mahogany skin crackling from the recent ordeal, bathed in his own tender juices, was slid down the bamboo pole to a giant platter and given the place of honor on the family board. Flanked on all sides by the results of the kitchen industry,—heaping plates of steamed yuca, mashed yams bristling with native peppers, boiled calabash, plump _boniatos_, golden Spanish chick-peas, even a Brobdingnagian beefsteak—and these in turn by the now thoroughly congenial hosts and guests, a barefoot, wide-eyed servant behind every other chair, the celebration began. Spanish wines which one would never have credited with finding their way to this far-off corner of the New World turned the big bucolic tumblers red and golden in perhaps too rapid succession. Dominican tales of the olden times, American pleasantries reclothed in rattling Castilian, reminiscences of Haitian occupation from the still bright-eyed grandmother, all rose in a babel of hilarity that floated away through the immense open doorways on the delightful trade winds that sweep constantly over the West Indies. But alas for the brevity of human appetite! Long before the center of attraction had lost his resemblance to the eager little rooter of the day before, while the Gargantuan beefsteak still sat intact, eyeing the circle with a neglected air, one after another of the sated convivialists was beckoning away with a scornful gesture of disinterest the candied and spiced papaya which the servants were bent on setting before him. What, too, shall I say of the dastardly conduct of “Big George?” For with his help the _lechón_, nay, even the neglected beefsteak, might have been reduced to more seemly proportions before they were abandoned to the eager fingers of the gleaming-toothed denizens of the kitchen. The painful truth is that the defelonizer of Porto Rico, the erstwhile dread of Canal Zone criminals, the man who had so often given a “summary” to a hapless member of the 17th Infantry for being a moment late at reveille, was absent without leave. Even “Mac,” with his whole family of little Mackites, their chubby faces giving a touch of old Erin to this Dominican landscape, had arrived on the scene at the crucial moment. What excuse, then, can one fabricate for an unhampered bachelor whose seven-league legs might have covered the paltry distance between new and old Santiago in a twinkling, yet who had chosen to desert his bidden guests in the heart of a bandit-infested island? Can even poetic license pardon a man, particularly a man who dents the lintels of half the doors he passes through, who remains at home to write sonnets when he might be partaking of _lechón asado?_ Certainly the admission of such irrelevant testimony as the fact that the horse furnished him by an unobserving Dominican was not capable of lifting clear of the ground the seven-league legs already stigmatized cannot rank even as extenuating circumstances.