Their hosts first baked some kind of flapjacks and divided them among their guests; then gave them beans seasoned hot with pepper: also great pieces of squash cooked before the fire, which they said was delicious and sweet--more than good.

Then came a dish of dried meat pounded fine, mixed with green peppers and well fried in beef tallow.
This seemed to be the favorite dish of the proprietors, but was a little too hot for our people.

They called it _chili cum carne_--meat with pepper--and we soon found this to be one of the best dishes cooked by the Californians.

The children were carefully waited on and given special attention to by these good people, and it was nearly ten o'clock before the feast was over: then the household had evening worship by meeting in silence, except a few set words repeated by some in turn, the ceremony lasting half an hour or more.

Then they came and wished them _buenos noches_ in the most polite manner and left them to arrange their blankets on the floor and go to sleep.
The unaccustomed shelter of a roof and the restless worrying of the children, who required much attention, for the change of diet had about the same effect on them as on Rogers and myself when we first partook of the California food, gave them little sleep, but still they rested and were truly grateful for the most perfect hospitality of these kind hearted people.
In the morning the two horsemen and two Indians went to the corral, when the riders would catch a cow with their ropes and draw her head up to a post, binding it fast, while an Indian took a short piece of rope and closely tied the hind legs together above the gambrel joint, making the tail fast also.