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Updated: May 17, 2025
After a few months in the cave, Pomponio left it to be with the Indians in the forest near the mission; but he was careful to keep away from the neighborhood of the scene of his capture, judging rightly that that place would be under surveillance at any time of uneasiness. However, there was no thought of farther insurrection.
The touch of the cloth to his wounds was like fire; but by this time his nerves were benumbed to such a degree that he scarcely noticed it. Going on hands and knees, he started to creep over the distance lying between him and the fringe of trees near the presidio. There was a good half-mile, and Pomponio feared he could not cover it.
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.
It is a powerful, and, at need, murderous weapon. Pomponio pulled out his knife from its leather sheath and examined it by touch, for it was too dark to see it. He felt carefully of the blade; yes, it was, sharp as a razor, and would do the work wanted of it. He grasped it nervously, but firmly, in his right hand. Then he paused.
Three years later on, that is to say in the middle of August 1530, the death of his wife Cecilia, who had borne to him Pomponio, Orazio, and Lavinia, left him all disconsolate, and so embarrassed with the cares of his young family that he was compelled to appeal to his sister Orsa, who thereupon came from Cadore to preside over his household.
Great was the excitement at the presidio when Pomponio's escape was discovered. The soldiers, on going past the place on their morning rounds, saw the bloody tracks of the prisoner's descent on the wall under the window. An instant investigation was made, and the truth of the awful manner in which Pomponio had accomplished his evasion disclosed.
And what was Pomponio doing? At first from necessity, on account of his wounded feet, and afterward so long as the soldiers kept up a vigorous search for him, he made the cave, in which he had taken refuge, his home. All that day, following the night of his escape, he lay in the cave, more dead than alive, caring for nothing, wishing, even, he might die, now he was out of the grasp of his enemies.
Pomponio's friends would be here in an instant. He must go at once. He slipped away among the trees in the direction from which he had come, and vanished. A moment later four Indians appeared at the point where the soldier had stood when he fired. Their first glance at Pomponio revealed to them the meaning of the shot they had heard.
As Pomponio crouched there, bound and forsaken, a passionate feeling of revolt at his doom arose within him. Was he to be killed; must he leave this earth, beautiful to him even when in the lowest depths of misery, and that, too, at the command of his enemies, who had stolen his country and made him and his kindred slaves? They should not take his life, the only thing they had left him.
Pomponio walked out of the prison and to his house without a word. One night Father Altimira, who was a light sleeper, awoke, thinking he had heard a faint noise in the room adjoining his bed-room, which was used as a store-room for the books, the rich vestments embroidered with gold and silver threads, and the money belonging to the mission.
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