"I know, colonel," answered the _vaquero_.
"Have you brought us worse tidings than his?"
"That depends upon the light in which you look upon them, señores."
"Oh!" was the reply, while the speaker swayed himself carelessly from side to side; "If you love your ease, it is very probable it would be troubled before long, and, in that case, the news I bring cannot be very pleasant to you; but if you are fond of mounting to meet the redskins, you can easily gratify your whim, and all I have to tell you will be very acceptable."
Notwithstanding the gravity of the situation and the anxiety they felt, the governor and his officers could not help smiling at the singular logic of the _vaquero_.
"Explain, Zapote," said Don José; "we shall then know what to think of your tidings."
"Hardly ten minutes after my comrade left me, I was rummaging in the bushes, which seemed to me to have an odd kind of motion, when I discovered a _peon_, whose terror was so great, that it took me a good half hour to get him to describe the dangers from which he had escaped. The fellow belonged to a poor old man called Ignacio Rayal, one of the two solitary individuals who escaped from the massacre of the inhabitants of the peninsula of San-José by the Apaches in the last invasion, twenty years ago. The _peon_ and his master were looking for firewood, without dreaming of danger, when the Indians suddenly started up close by. The former had time to hide himself in a drain; but the old man, too feeble to save himself, fell into the hands of the savages, who butchered him with all the refinements of their horrid barbarity. His body was riddled with wounds, till his own mother would not have known him; he had received twenty lance thrusts; and his head was smashed to atoms with tomahawks. I left the _peon_ to watch in our ambuscade, after I had restored his courage as well as I could, and, proceeding in the direction he pointed out, was not long in seeing a host of Indians driving before them a multitude of cattle and prisoners. These fellows put everything to sack and fire on their route; they were marching rapidly on the _presidio_, and detached parties at intervals to destroy the haciendas on their road. The haciendas of Piedra Rosa and San Blas are no longer standing; they are now a heap of ashes, under which their unfortunate owners lie buried. These are my tidings; make what you like out of them, señores."