being trampled from the husk under the feet of oxen. He was filled with a compelling curiosity to witness this operation.
This threshing pen was about fifty feet in diameter. In the center of it sheaves of untrampled grain were thrown, from which point they were distributed under the oxen's feet as required. Two teams of oxen yoked four abreast, were being driven around the circle, prodded out of their ordinarily leisurely gait by young men who trotted beside them with goads. The cattle were dripping sweat, their tongues were lolling, apparently at the utter bound of endurance. Dust rose thick from the dry straw, and from the un-covered ground where the grain was beaten out under the tortured creatures' feet.
The Indians, not far enough advanced yet to feel compassion for a suffering beast, seemed altogether unconscious of their cruelty. Here, as elsewhere when they worked without the direct superintendence of Don Geronimo, there was singing and laughter and merry light words among the young men who had been born and bred under the mission régime. Only the older men, the true neophytes, or converts from the state of heathen, were silent as they moved slowly, apathetically, perhaps unwillingly, about their appointed tasks.
These men, some of them shrivelled of skin and grey, seemed dulled by a heavy melancholy. Maybe they were thinking of the days before the padres came, when they were unrestrained and free. In those times it was the custom, at this season of the
