If a war party met with failure it would try to recover its prestige by attacking whatever came in its way, but if it were successful, all but the enemy it had originally proceeded against were comparatively safe. A successful band reaching the borders of its home camp would send a runner in with the announcement, when the people would turn out to form a triumphal procession, and the braves decked themselves out in war-bonnets, war-shirts, etc., kept for such parades. One with his face blackened carried a long pole from which the bloody scalp-trophies dangled, and these were saluted with shouts of joy. At the same time they were reviled as enemies. This pole was planted in front of the lodge of the head chief, where later the scalp-dance and other ceremonies were performed. Many tribes removed all their hair but a solitary lock, called the scalp-lock in consequence, left for the benefit of the enemy. The number of scalps a warrior could boast was the gauge of his military importance in the tribe. But when the war party returned in defeat, the camp became a pandemonium of wailing, and moaning, and gnashing of teeth. Women chopped off fingers by way of mourning; tore their flesh; and braves also shockingly mutilated themselves. Then nothing short of a success in war could wash out the disgrace. [Illustration: House Ruin on Green River, Utah. Photograph by L. H. Johnson.] One hardly can believe that a large number of these people once had their villages and their farms east of the Mississippi, where the factory and the mowing-machine now hold sway, but in the South-west wherever we tread we discover some indication of the old population: a trail, an irrigating ditch, a tree for a ladder, house walls, rock pictures, etc., and often, far from the tumult of the modern world, we seem almost to catch the sigh of a voice, or the rustle of a blanket, in the breeze that whispers through the old piñon tree. On the East Mesa of the Mokis we appear to command a clear perspective, for the modern world is not evident. I always seemed there to be far out of it. Through their windows we can well see into the past and reconstruct the wilderness. Sitting on the housetop at the day's end, the surf of our restless civilisation beating against the far horizon, the vanished sun burnishing with a wondrous spread of gold the whole high vault of the Arizona sky, we drowsily follow the fading light as it dissolves in a sea-like mist the plains so far below, till they no longer have being but float from its firm moorings, the great headland—villages, rocks, and all—drifting it backward through phantasmal centuries. And out of the strange houses around us, where the mothers sing their lullabies, arise the forgotten hosts of other days, with the cry of the chase and the clash of battle, as if like Don Roderick we had unlocked the fateful gates of the Forbidden Tower and were about to be overwhelmed. Suddenly, amidst the turmoil of that ancient throng we discover a