It has paid better wages than the peon could earn any other way.

The local peon desires to toil no longer than is necessary to obtain the bare wherewithal to fill his belly.

For illustration of their service in reasoning, suppose you were asked to compare the serf, the peon and the American slave.

For example, your ideas of serf, peon and slave have some points in common.

infantry, infantryman, private, private soldier, foot soldier; Tommy Atkins^, rank and file, peon, trooper, sepoy^, legionnaire, legionary, cannon fodder, food for powder; officer &c (commander) 745; subaltern, ensign, standard bearer; spearman, pikeman^; spear bearer; halberdier^, lancer; musketeer, carabineer^, rifleman, jager

Tiger HuntingReturn to the Camp Coolie's Hut Indigo Beating Vats Indigo Beaters at work in the Vat Indian Factory Peon Indigo Planter's House Pig Stickers Carpenters and Blacksmiths at work Hindoo Village Temples CHAPTER I. Province of Behar.

[Illustration: INDIAN FACTORY PEON.]

When he had sealed the envelope and addressed it as the president had told him, he went down to the patio and found a peon talking to a guard.

He had also incurred the dislike of influential caciques by defending the occupants of small holdings on friar estates from the rapacity of their rich neighbours, and by protecting free-patent applicants and homesteaders when large landowners opposed their applications in order to prevent their securing land, so that they might the more easily be held as peon labourers.

José had humiliation as well as much bitterness to carry away with him; for he saw the señor with the bright blue eyes follow gladly the laughing Teresita to her rose garden, and as he went jingling across the patio without waiting to summon a peon to bring him his horse, he heard the voice of Don Andres making apology to Dade for the rudeness of him, José.

Diego being the peon in whose behalf Jack had last winter interfered with Perkins, his gratitude took the form of secret polishings upon the splendid riding-gear, the cleaning of Jack's boots and such voluntary services.

Diego grinned bashfully when Jack's shadow flung itself across the saddle and so announced his coming, and stood up and waited humbly before the white señor who had fought for him, a mere peon, born to kicks and cursings rather than to kindness, and so had won the very soul of him.

Behind him trotted a big, muscular peon who saw not half the reason for haste that blazoned itself across the soul of Diego.

He picked up the oaken stick, examined it critically for the last time, although he knew well that it was polished smooth as glass from its work on other riatas, twisted the riata once around it and signed to the other peon.

(Gustavo had the news from a peon who came straight through from Paso Robles on an errand for his master.)

"But all the same, I'd like to get my fingers on the fellow that took my riata!" Since he formulated that wish after he reached the doorway of the roomy box-stall where Surry was housed, he faced a badly scared peon as the door swung open.

It was only the blind worship and the loyalty of a peon whose feet were bare, whose hands were calloused with labor, whose face was seamed with the harshness of his serfdom.

Only a peon's loyalty; but something hard and bitter and reckless, something that might have proved a more serious handicap than a strange riata, dropped away from Jack's mood and left him very nearly his normal self.

" From an impulse of careless kindness he said it, even though he had been touched by the peon's anxiety for his welfare.

That his blue-eyed god should address him, a mere peon, as "thy," the endearing, intimate pronoun kept for one's friends!

And he put the statement into Spanish, so that the peon could understand.

Diego had played with him many times, to the discomfiture of the peon.

It's to ask how much is Diego's debt, and to say that I'll pay it if the peon wants to come with me.

Peasanthood was the condition of the agricultural laborer; it was skilled labor that made him freeneither peasant, peon, nor villein.

The peon class has always been a faithful laboring class in the coffee, sugar, and tobacco estates, and the slave element was never large.