Distant about a league south from Mission San Francisco stood a little Indian hut, made from the tules and rushes which were found growing with such luxuriance in all parts of Nueva California. It was built in the form of a cone with a blunt apex, was less than ten feet in diameter, and but little more than that in height. An opening near the ground gave communication with the outer air, and a small hole at the top of the hut allowed the smoke from the fire to pass away. This hut stood in the centre of a small open spot among the trees of the dense forest which surrounded it on all sides; small in extent like the many other wooded spots in the peninsula which terminated at the mission and the presidio of San Francisco, but sufficiently large to force a stranger to them to lose his way almost at the first step. But, difficult to find by the stranger, this little open space was correspondingly safe from pursuit by any one bent on hostile deeds; and for this reason it had been selected by Pomponio for a retreat for himself.
Pomponio was a mission Indian, had been connected with the religious establishment since boyhood, and had made, great progress on the way to becoming a civilized human being. He had a mind above the low level of the average Californian Indian intellect, and had been an object of solicitude to the padres, arousing in them an interest in his mental and spiritual welfare seldom evoked by the neophytes in general. 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. But when Pomponio left childhood and youth behind him, and acquired the mind of a man, Indian though it was, he began to see the state of things in a different light. “What right have these padres,” he would say to himself, “to come here from far away, take our land from us, make us work for them, and order us about as we should women and children taken from our enemies in war? And what do they give us in return? They teach us the religion of their God, and make us learn their catechism. Is their religion any, better than ours their God more powerful than 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.”