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