Page:On the border with Crook - Bourke - 1892.djvu/93

 So far as influence upon the community went, they might just as well have been in the bottom of the Red Sea. The divisions of the day were regulated and determined by the bells which periodically clanged in front of the cathedral church. When they rang out their wild peal for early Mass, the little world by the Santa Cruz rubbed its eyes, threw off the slight covering of the night, and made ready for the labors of the day. The alarm clock of the Gringo might have been sounding for two hours earlier, but not one man, woman, or child would have paid the slightest attention to the cursed invention of Satan. When the Angelus tolled at meridian, all made ready for the noon-day meal and the post-*prandial siesta; and when the hour of vespers sounded, adobes dropped from the palsied hands of listless workmen, and docile Papagoes, wrapping themselves in their pieces of "manta" or old "rebosos," turned their faces southward, mindful of the curfew signal learned from the early missionaries.

They were a singular people, the Papagoes; honest, laborious, docile, sober, and pure—not an improper character among them. Only one white man had ever been allowed to marry into the tribe—Buckskin Aleck Stevens, of Cambridge, Mass., and that had to be a marriage with bell, book, and candle and every formality to protect the bride.

I do not know anything about the Papagoes of to-day, and am prepared to hear that they have sadly degenerated. The Americans have had twenty years in which to corrupt them, and the intimacy can hardly have been to the advantage of the red man.