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bled off in patches revealing the adobe bricks. It is called the courthouse; a great hall on its second floor is used for judicial purposes on court days; its ground-floor rooms are living quarters for several families, whose numerous progeny whoop at their play about scenes of murder and in the cobwebby, haunted emptiness of the upper chambers.

All day long, picturesque Mexicans lounge in sun and shade on the long front porch of Penfield’s store, which was once the McSween store, built as a rival of Murphy's, and smoke endless cigarettes of yellow paper and gossip endlessly in Spanish. If you look closely at the solid wooden window shutters of the old building, you will find a thick sheet of steel between outer and inner layers of timber, meant to turn bullets in the days of feud when the store was, after a fashion, a fortress. Only now and then are any signs of life in the empty, silent street. Perhaps a woman in a sunbonnet with a basket on her arm on her way to market. Or a load of alfalfa piled high on a creaking, rattletrap wagon drawn by scarecrow ponies ready for the boneyard. Or a Mexican in a steeple hat bringing in firewood from the hills on a burro. The air is so still you can hear the gurgle of the asequia at the back of the roadside gardens and the drowsy song the Bonito sings among its willows in the bottoms. The tall, gray cañon walls are stippled with piñon and oak brush. Up the cañon, Capitan Mountain shows a purple giant shoulder through a gap in the hills.

You can hardly believe that this peaceful village was once the stage setting of a bloody vendetta. Only a few old-timers are left who know, in anything like accurate detail, the stories of the old, wild days. If you should ever happen to go to Lincoln, hunt up Miguel Luna or