[Illustration: THE CHURCH AT ISLETA. A church, whose ancient adobe flanks have been topped by two wooden bird-cages for steeples.] The gentle Pueblos, horrified by this act of personal treachery, which they regarded not only as a violation of their sacred laws of hospitality but as a crime against a medicine-man with powerful if strange gods, were in terror lest the approaching Spaniards should hear of the monk’s fate and avenge the double crime against their race and religion on the entire village. What the Spaniard could do on such occasions was only too well known to the Pueblo tribes. At nightfall the chiefs of the village placed the body, wrapped only in a sheet, on a litter, which four swift runners carried seventy miles south to Isleta. There under the dirt floor of the old church, whose walls have since been destroyed and replaced by the present structure, they placed the padre without preparing his body for burial or his soul for resurrection. If they had only said a prayer for him, they might have spared much trouble to their descendants. But they were in a hurry. They buried the corpse deep, six feet before the altar and a little to one side of it, and pressed down the dirt as it had been. The Spaniards came and went, and never learned of the murder. This prelude to the story came from Juan Pancho, one of the leading citizens of Isleta. The sand-storm which had turned the sky a dingy yellow gave signs of becoming more threatening, and a flat tire incurred as we stopped at his house for directions seemed to make it the part of wisdom to stop overnight in the little town. When we inquired about hotels, he offered us a room in his spotless adobe house, with the hospitality that is instinctive in that part of the country. We found him an unusual man with a keen and beautifully intellectual face. In his youth, he told us, he was graduated from one or two colleges, and then completed his education by setting type for an encyclopedia, after which he returned to his native village and customs. He can speak four languages--Spanish, English, baseball slang, and the Isleta dialect which is his native tongue. When he came home after his sojourn with the white man, he discarded their styles in clothing, and adopted the fine blue broadcloth trousers, closely fitting, the ruffled and pleated white linen shirt which the Indian had adopted from the Spaniard as the dress of civilized ceremony. On his feet he wore henna-stained moccasins, fastened with buttons of Navajo silver. He took pride in his long black hair, as do most Pueblo Indians, and, though he wore it in a chonga knot during business hours, in the relaxation of his comfortable adobe home he loosened it, and delighted in letting it flow free.