as visiting guests, it being in the time of the harvest of maize, when these Indians celebrate their great Thanksgiving feast.  A young Navajo chief, who led the visiting party, aroused the ire of the old medicine chief of the tribe, who had lately added a new attraction to his household, beshrewing himself with another lovely young squaw.  It was said that the enamored damsel had made preparations to elope with the gallant Navajo chief, but was betrayed by the telltale barking of the dogs, great numbers of which infest all Indian villages.  The old doctor accused the Navajos of espionage and had them taken by surprise and imprisoned in an underground foul den.  Then met the chiefs of the tribe in their estufa, or secret meeting place, to pass judgment on the culprits.  The old medicine chief smoked himself into a trance in order to receive special instructions from the great Spirit regarding the degree of punishment to be inflicted on the unlucky Navajos.  After sleeping several hours, he awoke and announced that he had dreamed the Navajos were to be clubbed to death.  After sunrise the next morning these poor Indians met their doom in the public square of the village unflinchingly in the presence of the whole population.

They were placed in a row, facing the sun, about ten feet apart.  A Zuni executioner, armed with a war club, was stationed in front of each victim, and another one, armed likewise, stood behind him.  A war chief raised his arms and yelled, and forty clubs were raised in air.  Then the great war drum, or tombe, boomed out the knell of death.  There was a sickening, crashing thud, and twenty Navajos fell to earth with crushed skulls, each cabeza having been whacked simultaneously, right and left, fore and aft, by two stone clubs in the hands of a pair of devils.

It had always been an enigma to me that the Pueblo Indians, who were not to be matched as fighters against the Apache and Navajo had been able to defend their villages against the onslaught of these fierce tribes, their hereditary enemies.  Don Juan Mestal enlightened me on that topic.  He said the explanation therefor was to be found in a certain religious superstition of the Navajos and Apaches, which circumstance the Pueblo Indians took advantage of and exploited to the saving of their lives.  When they had reason to expect an attack on their villages, the Pueblo laid numerous mines and torpedoes on all the approaches and streets of their towns.  While these mines did not possess the destructive power of dynamite or gunpowder, they were equally effective and powerful, and never failed to repulse the enemy, especially if reinforced by hand grenades of like ammunition, thrown by squaws and pappooses from the flat roofs of their houses.  By some means or other it had become known to the descendants of Montezuma that when an Apache stepped on something out of the ordinary “he scented mischief” and believed himself unclean and befouled with dishonor, and fancied himself disgraced before God and man; and forthwith he would hie himself away to do penance at the shrine of the nearest water sprite.  This superstition they brought from Asia, their native land.