very few
had crossed, when one in his excitement caught the rope and pulled the
log across after him.

It was a fearful moment. There were less than a dozen Spaniards thus
left standing alone on the brink of Acoma, cut off from their companions
by a gulf hundreds of feet deep, and surrounded by swarming savages. The
Indians, sallying from their refuge, fell instantly upon them on every
hand. As long as the Spanish soldier could keep the Indians at a
distance, even his clumsy firearms and inefficient armor gave an
advantage; but at such close quarters these very things were a fatal
impediment by their weight and clumsiness. Now it seemed as if the
previous Acoma massacre were to be repeated, and the cut-off Spaniards
to be hacked to pieces; but at this very crisis a deed of surpassing
personal valor saved them and the cause of Spain in New Mexico. A
slender, bright-faced young officer, a college boy who was a special
friend and favorite of Onate, sprang from the crowd of dismayed
Spaniards on the farther bank, who dared not fire into that
indiscriminate jostle of friend and foe, and came running like a deer
toward the chasm. As he reached its brink his lithe body gathered
itself, sprang into the air like a bird, and cleared the gulf! Seizing
the log, he thrust it back with desperate strength until his companions
could grasp it from the farther brink; and over the restored bridge the
Spanish soldiers poured to retrieve the day.

Then began one of the most fearful hand-to-hand struggles in all
American history. Outnumbered nearly ten to one, lost in a howling mob
of savages who fought with the frenzy of despair, gashed with raw-edged
knives, dazed with crushing clubs, pierced with bristling arrows, spent
and faint and bleeding, Zaldivar and his hero-handful fought their way
inch by inch, step by step, clubbing their heavy guns, hewing with their
short swords, parrying deadly blows, pulling the barbed arrows from
their quivering flesh. On, on, on they pressed, shouting the gallant
war-cry of Santiago, driving the stubborn foe before them by still more
stubborn valor, until at last the Indians, fully convinced that these
were no human foes, fled to the refuge of their fort-like houses, and
there was room for the reeling Spaniards to draw breath. Then thrice
again the summons to surrender was duly read before the strange
tenements, each near a thousand feet long, and looking like a flight of
gigantic steps carved from one r