After all human nature is pretty much alike, when you come to take off the outward veneer that is given by different associations and methods of living. Adrian had seen just such sights as these, minus the rattlesnakes, and the weird dress of the participants, in many a gathering in the East, where thousands went fairly wild over a fiercely contested football game.
As the twilight began to fall the furious dance came to an end at the command of the medicine man, whose word was law with the Zunis. He knew it had now reached its proper conclusion, and
that the warriors were almost at the point of utter exhaustion.
“All over but the shoutin’, and perhaps it’s safe for us to get down off this rock pile now,” remarked Billie, as the last of the dancers went staggering away, leaving the arena that had been the theater of their weird ceremony to the thronging squaws and boys and girls.
So they sought their tent, to prepare the evening meal. Of course their talk was mostly about the remarkable scene they had just witnessed, and which would never entirely fade from their minds.
“And if my pictures only come out good, as I reckon they ought,” Billie went on to remark, “I’ll be able to stagger some of the fellows at home, when I get there. But there’s one thing I’m ahoping, and that is that none of them wrigglers got away. I’d sure hate to wake up tonight from a jolly good snooze, to find a big old rattler perched on my chest, and ready to jab me with his business end if I so much as moved my little finger. Wow! it makes me creep just to think of it.”
And indeed, the subject was on Billie’s mind so much that he later on made sure to thoroughly examine every inch of space inside the canvas, shaking their blankets carefully, and finally getting Donald to again encircle the tent with that horse-hair lariat of his, over which he had said no snake would ever dare crawl.
And so ended the great day at the Zuni village, which the Indians looked forward to each year with the liveliest anticipations; and the three chums had reason to feel thankful that the bold plot of Braddon the showman had not resulted in their being expelled from the place without a chance to see the “circus,” as Billie called it.
[CHAPTER XXVII.—HOMEWARD BOUND.]
Billie was also a little bit worried for fear that Braddon and his two companions might not have gone far away; but, feeling so badly toward the three chums for having nipped their scheme in the bud, he dreaded lest they return under cover of darkness, bent on evening up the debt they thought they owed the Broncho Rider Boys.