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Updated: May 17, 2025
This action of Pomponio recalled him to himself, and the responsibility resting on him regarding the safety of the mission funds. With hasty strides, the Father started off to seek assistance. He hurried to the other end of the row of buildings, some three hundred feet distant, where lived the Mexican servants of the mission.
For years Pomponio had been contented with the life he led under the tutelage and control of the fathers, receiving unquestioningly their teaching, and regarding their ordering and direction of his and his parents' life and actions in every particular with indifferent eyes.
When morning came; the first thing the Father did was to send a messenger to the presidio, four miles distant, with a letter to the commandant, relating the occurrence of the night, and asking for a guard for the mission, and a number of men to take up the hunt for the escaped culprit. The soldiers arrived during the day, and at once made active preparations for finding Pomponio.
This would advance him in the good graces of the commandant. There was no time to lose. Pomponio might awake at any moment; his friends in the forest might return on the instant. He raised his musket and took long and steady aim at the Indian. There was a report that raised the echoes.
Seeing the form of a man, he started, and was on the point of springing away into the forest, when Pomponio spoke, this time in a louder and stronger tone: "Help me Taxlipu, I am nearly dead. I am Pomponio." "Pomponio!" almost shrieked the boy. "It cannot be. I saw Pomponio carried away and locked up at the presidio, and an Indian told me he had been chained fast to the wall of his prison cell."
As Pomponio passed the Father in his flight from the room, to rob which he had made such a bold and nearly successful attempt, he heard the priest calling him to stop; but what cared he for his master?
They delayed only long enough to relate the circumstance of the capture, and to get two of the soldiers, acting as guard at the mission, to accompany them to the presidio. Pomponio did not see the Father, who was engaged with the sick in the hospital, and he was glad. After a stop, of a few minutes, they again took up their march, and reached the presidio a little later.
With lightning speed the soldier reloaded, and then cautiously drew nearer; but there was no need of apprehension from Pomponio. He was dead shot through the heart. The soldier gazed at the inanimate form, at the bullet-hole in his breast, from which the blood was trickling, and at the poor mutilated feet. Did a glimmer of pity stir in his heart? It were hard to say.
It is a matter of regret that this was so, yet, though an evil, it was a necessary one, for to do any measure of good to the Indians, an oversight in every detail was essential; and, after all, the savages were treated with almost uniform mildness, and the instances of cruelty and wickedness practiced toward them, as in this tale of Pomponio, were most happily very rare.
However conscientiously he might henceforward edit the report, he realized that his position was no longer secure; he was liable to be recalled at any moment to cede his place to some candidate of the opposing faction. Those damned republics! Or the post, being a purely honorary one created expressly for himself by the obliging and now defunct Don Pomponio, might be permanently abolished.
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