The richest inhabitants had begun to talk of founding a university, to which the government of the State was to contribute. The citizens were prosperous. The trade in quicksilver, oranges, barley, and wine brought them famous profits. They were upright, thrifty, industrious, systematic, fat. Whoever might visit in later years Antelope with a population nearing twenty thousand would not recognize in the rich merchants of the place those pitiless warriors who fifteen years before had burned Chiavatta. The days passed for them in their stores, workshops, and offices; the evenings they spent in the beer-saloon “Golden Sun” on Rattlesnake Street. Listening to those sounds somewhat slow and guttural of “Mahlzeit, Mahlzeit!” (meal-time, meal-time), to those phlegmatic “Nun ja wissen Sie, Herr Müller, ist das aber möglich?” (Well, now, Herr Müller, but is that possible?), that clatter of goblets, that sound of beer dropping on the floor, that plash of overflowing foam; seeing that calm, that ness, those Philistine faces covered with fat, those fishy eyes,—a man might suppose himself in a beer-garden in Berlin or Monachium, and not on the ruins of Chiavatta. But in the town everything was “ganz gemüthlich” (altogether cosey), and no one had a thought of the ruins. That evening the whole population was hastening to the circus, first, because after hard labor recreation is as praiseworthy as it is agreeable; second, because the inhabitants were proud of its arrival. It is well-known that circuses do not come to every little place; hence the arrival of the Hon. M. Dean’s troupe had confirmed the greatness and magnificence of Antelope. There was, however, a third and perhaps the greatest cause of the general curiosity. No. Two of the programme read as follows: “A walk on a wire extended fifteen feet above the ground will be made to the accompaniment of music by the renowned gymnast Black Vulture, sachem of the Black Snakes, the last descendant of their chiefs, the last man of the tribe. 1. The walk; 2. Springs of the Antelope; 3. The death-dance and death-song.” If that “sachem” could rouse the highest interest in any place, it was surely in Antelope. Hon. M. Dean told at the “Golden Sun” how fifteen years before, on a journey to Santa Fé, he had found, on the Planos de Tornado, a dying old Indian with a boy ten years of age. The old man died from wounds and exhaustion; but before death he declared that the boy was the son of the slain sachem of the Black Snakes, and the heir to that office.