ed blindly over the cliffs and were dashed to pieces.

In a few minutes the remainder of the force was in full retreat and not
an arrow had been shot. The Apaches, though stricken with terror at these
pyrotechnics, overcame the memory of them sufficiently in a couple of
years to attempt the sack of the fort on their own account, but the queen
repelled them as she had forced back the Zunis, and with even greater
slaughter. From that time the dwarfs were never harmed again, but they
went away, as suddenly as they had come, to a secret recess in the
mountains, where the Pale Faced Lightning still rules them.

Some of the Apaches maintain that her spirit haunts a cave on
Superstition Mountain, where her body vanished in a blaze of fire, and
this cave of the Spirit Mother is also pointed out on the south side of
Salt River. A skeleton and cotton robes, ornamented and of silky texture,
were once found there. It is said that electrical phenomena are frequent
on the mountain, and that iron, copper, salt, and copperas lying near
together may account for them.

THE WEIRD SENTINEL AT SQUAW PEAK

There is a cave under the highest butte of the Squaw Peak range, Arizona,
where a party of Tonto Indians was found by white men in 1868. The white
men were on the war-path, and when the Tontos fell into their hands they
shot them unhesitatingly, firing into the dark recesses of the cavern,
the fitful but fast-recurring flashes of their rifles illuminating the
interior and exposing to view the objects of their hatred.

The massacre over, the cries and groans were hushed, the hunters strode
away, and over the mountains fell the calm that for thousands of years
had not been so rudely broken. That night, when the moon shone into this
pit of death, a corpse arose, walked to a rock just within the entrance,
and took there its everlasting seat.

Long afterward a man who did not know its story entered this place, when
he was confronted by a thing, as he called it, that glared so fearfully
upon him that he fled in an ecstasy of terror. Two prospectors
subsequently attempted to explore the cave, but the entrance was barred
by "the thing." They gave one glance at the torn face, the bulging eyes
turned sidewise at them, the yellow fangs, the long hair, the spreading
claws, the livid, mouldy flesh, and rushed away. A Western paper,
recounting their adventure, said that one of the men declared that there
was not money enough in Maricopa Count