For meals and lodgings _en route_, we did indeed have to "rough it" pretty generally, nearly everywhere--especially after passing Villacito. Salt pork fried, saleratus biscuit hot, and coffee plain, came again into vogue, as in the famous Bitter Creek region; but we supplemented them this time with some excellent canned fruits and vegetables, that we had the foresight to bring along. Our evenings usually ended in long "yarns," after which, spreading our blankets in the hay-corral, or on a sand-heap, we went cosily to sleep beneath the stars. We always slept with our revolvers under our heads, and our rifles by our sides; and though a bit nervous sometimes when we reflected how much we were at the mercy of the rough customers we met _en route_, yet we slept well, and went through safely. At Porte de la Cruz, before reaching the Desert, we passed an Indian village; but they all seemed quiet and peaceable. They belonged to the Dieganos, a tribe extending from the Coast Range to the Colorado, and wandering over much of the country we had passed through. A score or more of them lay basking in the sun, as we drove by, and they seemed to be about as helpless and idiotic a people, as human nature could well furnish. They are said to subsist chiefly on snakes, lizards, grasshoppers, mescal, etc., and appeared to be worse off than any Red Skins we had encountered yet. At Laguna, in the midst of the Desert, we chanced upon another party of them. As we drove up to Mr. Ganow's, the station-keeper there, we observed quite a crowd of them running around the corner of the lagoon, and making for the station. We supposed, at first, that our arrival was the sensation that attracted them; but as they drew nearer, we saw they were angry and excited, and Mr. Ganow presently explained, that one of them had been robbed of a knife and a silver dollar by a white man at Indian Wells--some four miles farther on--and, when afterwards he remonstrated, the white man had tied him up and flogged him. The poor wretch, still bruised and bleeding, now came with twenty or thirty of his comrades, from their camp beyond the Laguna, to Mr. Ganow--to report the outrage and seek redress. Ganow said the white man referred to was a mean fellow, bad enough for anything, who made a living chiefly by gambling with the Indians, and selling them mescal and needle-gun whiskey, and that he kept the countryside in a constant turmoil. He advised his copper-colored friends to return to the Wells, and demand their property again, and say a U. S. officer was at his ranch, and would be along next day and look after him, if he did not give it up. This seemed to satisfy them, and they all started off on a long trot, kicking a ball before them as they ran, and were soon out of sight. One of them, rejoicing in the name of Charley, was dressed in cast-off army-clothing, and spoke broken-English pretty well. We gave him a handful of cigarritos and