The Gringos [antikvár]

THE GRINGOS Harry Arthur BuickHarry Buick and his family came to Tepehuanes from the lawless cattlelands of the Old West. They came to mine gold and the fortune they carved out of the Sierra Madre made them a living legend.Harry Buick stayed in Mexico for thirteen of the most dangerous years in its history.Attacked by Yaqui Indians, hunted by Pancho Villa's revolutionaries, imprisoned by Government troops, he fought his way out of Mexico in 1916 more dead than aliveonly to return and carve a second fortune from the barren hills of the Sierra Madre.Harry Buick's true account of the pioneer miners of Old Mexico is an enthralling saga of the lawless frontier, and a living proof of the theory that fact is stranger than fiction.FOREWORDToday, while I was playing billiards in the little bistro up the street past the workshops of all the potters, I listened with half an ear to a long-drawn-out friendly altercation, over a glass of vin rouge, between two labourers in blue dungarees. It was one of those arguments which could take place only in France. In Mexico the two workmen would have been squabbling about cock-fighting or horses or women; in the United States about dollars or baseball; and in England about football or cricket. Here they were arguing about whether the disciples could possibly have remembered Christ's actual words so as to record them accurately forty years later. The free-thinkerand to be that is almost an occupation in Franceinsisted that it would be impossible for any man to remember the very words that had been used forty years earlier; the faithful son of the Church contended that it was quite feasible.As I half listened, I thought of this account I have been writing of the first thirty years of my life. It all happened at least half a century ago, indeed some of it more than seventy years ago. Yet as I have thought about it, I have relived those years. I may perhaps have got muddled from time to time about dates and the sequence of events; but the scenes of what happened are as vivid to me now as when they occurred. I hear again the words used, even the intonation of the voice, and can see the expression on the speaker's face all as clearly as if it were a film that was being run.As I write this, I realise that I still have half a century of adventurous life to tell about and that at my age time is short. Even these words I may never see in print. 'What happened then?' I always used to ask when I was a small boy and the story being read to me had finished. So perhaps I had better, just briefly, add an outline of what happened after the events narrated in this book.One wet and cold night while I was serving with the United States Army in France in the First World War, I was billeted in a vast stone château m which there lived a lovely princess To be more factual, she was a widow with a small boy;