189S 
of lands belonging to neighboring village. 
Tetela del 
Yolcan 
The larger towns have their police regularly employed, but the 
small towns are forced to do voluntary guard duty. The community own 
arms and every able-bodied man among the villagers is on a list. The 
community is then divided into guard sections ■which are each given 
their regular day of duty and are required to be on hand as noted. 
These "vecinos 51 , as they are called, are met in all sorts of out- 
of-the-way places and undoubtedly do much to make robbery difficult. 
They are held in strict accountability for the good order of their dis¬ 
tricts by the higher authorities. These vecinoa wear no uniform but 
the everyday costume of the laboring classes so that it is a little un¬ 
pleasant to come upon them suddenly in out-of-the-way places. Robberies 
occur despite them at no great intervals, and ay assistant had a narrow 
escape near this place. He left a trail and descended into a narrow, 
wooded canon on the mountainside one afternoon and was surprised to 
see 3 men follow him,- one with a lasso, one with a stout cudgel, and 
the other with a large knife in his hand. Ity assistant at once faced 
them and, levelling his gun at the foremost, told him to stop which he 
did very promptly and began to abuse my man with all the epithets he 
could command. To this the latter paid no attention, but quietly moved 
off leaving the discomfitted rascals in their tracks. It is a regular 
trick for these mountain Indians to pretend to wish to see what game a 
hunter has and the moment they get within reach they seise the hunter 
% 
and rob and maltreat, or kill him. 
While we were at this place, a pilgrimage of the Indians from 
Tlacala and Puebla began,- to a fiesta of some saint in southwestern 
Morelos, 
Hundreds of them streamed by for two daysj men, women, and children. 
The men and women nearly all carried a little roll of long wax candles 
- 157 - 
