Page:Journal of American Folklore vol. 12.djvu/298

 2S6 Journal of American Folk-Lore.

by, she rose and gave him her place at the drum. After she had formed an open circular space in the middle of the wondering crowd, she beckoned to the boys and the men to join with her in dancing to the music of the song and the drum ; and while the boys and the men fell to dancing the step she taught them, the girls and the women went and sat down beside the drummers and singers.

" Now the booming of the drum, the singing of the great chorus of men who had joined with the four singers at the drum, and the whoops and the yells of dancers were all heard in the distant camp of the foe. Quickly, in the firelight, the warriors of the enemy sprang to their sacred war bags, and rubbed a pinch of magic paint over their cheeks and upon their weapons. Then, leaping upon their bare-back ponies, they disappeared in the darkness with the war-chiefs in the lead. On reaching the top of the butte above the wigwams of the village, they stopped and listened, but only long enough to locate the place where the singing and the dancing were going on. Then the chiefs yelled the war-whoop, the warriors gave it back, and all, bending far over on the backs of their ponies, rode at full speed down the slope.

" Meantime, in the village below, the dance went on. Nearer and nearer sounded the heavy tramp of many horses, and louder and fiercer grew the yells and whoops of the enemy. But all the while the boom of the drum increased, the singing grew more spirited, and the number of dancers swelled. Like a big, black cloud suddenly rising, the enemy loomed out of the darkness. But at the very moment when the ponies were about to dash into the throng to scatter it, at the very moment when the noses of the ponies struck the backs and the shoulders of the people who were looking on at the dance, that very moment the ponies halted — stopped stiff in their tracks. Their riders in anger lashed, clubbed, and kicked them, but the only movement the ponies would make was to turn their heads and their necks to one side or the other. Finding their ponies would budge no farther, the men leaped to the ground. But the moment they alighted, the spirit of hatred left their hearts. They flung aside their shields, their war-clubs, their bows and their quivers of arrows, and joined in the dancing and in the singing with the men whom they had come to slay. And the warriors of the two nations, while smoking together the pipes of peace, listened to the words of Shaskasi, telling them that war between them was over."

Passion Play at Coyoacan. — The " Herald," of the City of Mexico, Mexico, gives an account of the Passion Play, as performed in 1899 at Coyoacan, where the environment is said to be more picturesque than at other villages in the neighborhood of the capital : —

" It was at Coyoacan that Madam Calderon de la Barca saw the Passion Play, and really, in reading her excellent description of it, one is struck with the little variation wrought by a lapse of fifty-five years. In one part she says : ' The padre's sermon was really eloquent in some passages, but lasted nearly an hour, during which time we admired the fortitude of the

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