Next morning, the 4th, the Wolf was despatched with fresh offers of peace and the Holy Cross, only to return about ten o’clock with the verbal reply that the Ácomas would talk with the general on his way back from Zuñi! Exasperated by this subterfuge, Vargas reconnoitred to see whether there was enough available water near by “to subdue the enemy on said Great Rock, the strength of which is unassailable.” Finding no water, Vargas made the ascent of the sand-ramp a second time, only to find the face and trenches of the mesa crowded by a multitude of its inhabitants. Again the Ácomas were assured of the peaceful intent of the visitors. Their chief, Matthew, an educated Indian, made answer that his people had been warned of quite different designs. Vargas now dismounted, followed by his secretary and the military chiefs. They seated themselves upon flat stones near the fortified entrance. Rising to his full height he proposed that Matthew should swing himself down over the barricade, while Vargas and his few attendants would go on foot up the “impossible part of the approach.” The Indians seem to have agreed to this and there was general embracing when the two companies came together. Vargas then describes the flat top of Ácoma as divided into three sections, and along “the side of the Square a large race-track.” Here was enacted one more of those picturesque ceremonies that we should like to visualize. Vargas stood upon the arena of that sanguinary struggle for possession of the Rock in Oñate’s time, almost a hundred years before, the memory of which we may be sure had been transmitted in fadeless colors through the generations. Only half convinced as yet that more disaster was not in store for them, tremulous and all unknowing what such forced submission might entail, the dusky throng of primitive folk knelt before the royal standard of Spain and watched the captain of the post of El Paso as he planted the Christian Cross in their midst. Chief Matthew, acting as interpreter for these invading strangers, told them, as he was bidden, of the great sovereign so far away that they would never see him, yet so all-powerful that he claimed their land, their allegiance, their very lives for his own, while at the same time professing to advance their own best welfare.