an the Great Spirit? What
better is it to till the ground for growing food than to kill the wild
animals with bow and arrow? Why did my father's father and all the
strong men of those days permit these espanoles to come here? I would
have, withstood them to the last drop of my life's blood."

Thus would Pomponio question. The Indians of Nueva California were mild
and gentle, having nothing in common with their neighbors, the warlike
Yumas, and were easily subjected by the early Franciscans. But gentle
and pliant as they were, there were always a few, fiercer than the rest,
who did not brook calmly the sight of their subjection; and these bolder
ones stirred up, from time to time, the other natives to insurrection.
Many were the uprisings at the different missions--one of the earliest
at San Diego, in 1775, when the savages killed one of the padres; one,
the last, and only a few months before the beginning of our tale, late
in 1824, when the two missions, Purezima and Santa Inez, were almost
destroyed. This last uprising had had more to do with Pomponio's change
of attitude toward the fathers than anything else; and it had fired his
zeal to devote his life to the freeing of his kindred and tribe from the
slavery in which they were held at Mission San Francisco.

Pomponio, simple savage that he was, knew little of human nature; either
Indian or civilized. He judged others by himself, not realizing the
great difference between himself and the generality of the tribe to
which he belonged. He had had many talks with the various men of the
tribe, trying to instill into their minds some of the ferment of his
own; but to his amazement and anger they were too far sunk in their
servitude to be roused by his projects. A few there were, young and
venturesome like himself, who declared themselves ready to follow him
as a leader; and among these were some of the fierce savages of the
forests, with whom he was always in touch; but how could a mere handful
of a score of Indians cope successfully with the men of the mission,
aided, as they would be, by the trained soldiers of the presidio?
Pomponio had sense enough to see that such procedure would be foolhardy,
and he abandoned the plan for the time, hoping his little body of
followers would increase, when the disparity in strength and numbers
between the two sides might be less.

Pomponio was some twenty-three years old. A short time before he had
married an Indian girl, and, with he