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not for fun this time, but for revenge. There was a dance going on in an adobe house that still stands under the shadow of San Juan Church. The fiddles were playing a waltz when the Horrels stalked in and assisted with a six-shooter obbligato which left one woman and four men lifeless on the dancing floor, one of them the father of Juan Patron. Soon afterward, the Horrel boys turned their backs on their foolish but tragic little war and went home to Texas. They still speak in Lincoln of this two-act blood-and-thunder melodrama that grew out of a joke as the Horrel war.

Many men died with their boots on in Lincoln; some went out fighting; others mysteriously disappeared; and they were buried here and there about the town. Lincoln somehow never achieved a cemetery until recent years. The secretly murdered men were secretly buried; the graves of others were marked at first with little wooden crosses bearing names. These crosses crumbled away in time; they were never replaced because nobody cared; the names of the dead passed out of the memories of the living, and their graves were forgotten. You will hear in Lincoln that a certain man in his days of power had in his hire picked killers who acted as his Destroying Angels or Danites and quietly removed any of his foes he marked for destruction. The tale is generally discredited as an invention of enemies and no evidence whatever remains to substantiate it; but in its most definite version it estimates the number of these disappearances at "about twenty-five": Mexicans mostly who, it is said, were rolled in blankets, dumped into shallow holes, and covered with earth.

From time to time the bones of the nameless dead sleeping in their forgotten graves are turned up by some Mex-