>Now the Padre began to feel alarmed, to wish he had gone down that
>stairway with the others, while there was yet time. He wished
>he were anywhere in the world but on this rock. There was old
>Father Ramirez's donkey path; but if the Indians were watching one
>road, they would watch the other. The spot of black hair never
>stirred; and there were but those two ways down to the plain, only
>those. . . . Whichever way one turned, three hundred and fifty feet
>of naked cliff, without one tree or shrub a man could cling to.
>As the sun sank lower and lower, there began a deep, singing murmur
>of male voices from the pueblo below him, not a chant, but the
>rhythmical intonation of Indian oratory when a serious matter is
>under discussion. Frightful stories of the torture of the
>missionaries in the great rebellion of 1680 flashed into Friar
>Baltazar's mind; how one Franciscan had his eyes torn out, another
>had been burned, and the old Padre at Jamez had been stripped naked
>and driven on all fours about the plaza all night, with drunken
>Indians straddling his back, until he rolled over dead from
>exhaustion.
>Moonrise from the loggia was an impressive sight, even to this
>Brother who was not over-impressionable. But tonight he wished he
>could keep the moon from coming up through the floor of the
>desert,--the moon was the clock which began things in the pueblo.
>He watched with horror for that golden rim against the deep blue
>velvet of the night.
>The moon came, and at its coming the Ácoma people issued from their
>doors. A company of men walked silently across the rock to the
>cloister. They came up the ladder and appeared in the loggia. The
>Friar asked them gruffly what they wanted, but they made no reply.
>Not once speaking to him or to each other, they bound his feet
>together and tied his arms to his sides.
>The Ácoma people told afterwards that he did not supplicate or
>struggle; had he done so, they might have dealt more cruelly with
>him. But he knew his Indians, and that when once they had
>collectively made up their pueblo mind . . . Moreover, he was a
>proud old Spaniard, and had a certain fortitude lodged in his well-
>nourished body. He was accustomed to command, not to entreat, and
>he retained the respect of his Indian vassals to the end.
>They carried him down the ladder and through the cloister and
>across the rock to the most precipitous cliff--the one over which
>the Ácoma women flung broken pots and such refuse as the turkeys
>would not eat. There the people were assembled. They cut his
>bonds, and taking him by the hands and feet, swung him out over the
>rock-edge and back a few times. He was heavy, and perhaps they
>thought this dangerous sport. No sound but hissing breath came
>through his teeth. The four executioners took him up again from
>the brink where they had laid him, and, after a few feints, dropped
>him in mid-air.
>So did they rid their rock of their tyrant, whom on the whole they
>had liked very well. But everything has its day. The execution
>was not followed by any sacrilege to the church or defiling of holy
>vessels, but merely by a division of the Padre's stores and
>household goods. The women, indeed, took pleasure in watching the
>garden pine and waste away from thirst, and ventured into the
>cloisters to laugh and chatter at the whitening foliage of the
>peach trees, and the green grapes shrivelling on the vines.
