He closed his sentence with so sad an air that all gazed at him, afraid to question.
"Yea, terrible events are in preparation, of which the swoop of the Apaches on the farm and the taking away of the heiress form no adequate examples. At least, when they strike, they fly, and are gone like the hawk. But a danger on the very hearth is arising. In short, friends of my little daughter here, listen; the Yaqui Indians, the Christians, the converts, the semi-civilised, whom we employ throughout Sonora as peons, field hands or labourers, have seen in the too often successful raids of the wild brethren active slurs on their tameness. The ease with which this last band of Apaches overcame the servants of don Benito has set them plotting, I know, to revolt against him, and against other masters, alas, not so kind, fair and punctual in payment of their pittance as your father, my poor child."
"Of them, who is going to be uneasy, father?" responded La Perla, with the confident, arrogant smile of the daughter of the ruling race. "Have not these poor dogs many a time in my young life, brooded, ay, and yelped of an attack, but between the menace and its execution, what a distance!"
"That is the saying of a child, gentlemen," continued Father Serafino. "She mistakes this time. Acknowledging the good Indians to have been treated badly of late, they are out of patience. They are in active rebellion. All the Indians who were on our Mission have disappeared. Last night," he added in a whisper, "of my two brothers who went over to the farms of Bella Vista and the Palmero, to inquire news, one only returned," this in a still lower tone so that the girl could not possibly overhear, "the outbreakers had carried them by storm—massacred every living creature and danced round the blazing buildings, one of those pagan dances whose memories I had hoped we had banished from their darkened brains. The surviving brother, hiding in the thicket till he could secure a stray horse, heard their council swear to destroy the white man and all his works throughout Sonora and retreat to the Northern Deserts to live free and wild in the abominable practices of their ancestors. They talked even of attacking Ures, and said all the Indians in the pueblos would join them. What will the hundred soldiers at Ures do? I tell you, gentlemen, such is the general situation."
"It's a tight nip," agreed Oliver.
"Terrible!" added the Englishman, shuddering to think of the poor father, his friend, ignorant still of the happy fate of his child, and exposed to the overwhelming storm of the revolted serfs.
"It is good and bad, too," resumed the priest, "that the neighbours and kinsmen of don Benito will be flocking there to celebrate the ascension to heaven of his grandchild. Good, that so many heads of family should be under one roof, but bad that their own homes should be without commanders at such an emergency."
"The Indians," said Oliver authoritatively, "will move in a mass, for they have not been trained as individual warriors; hence they will attack this house, which contains all they hate, their masters. My vote is: on to don Benito's!"
The priest bowed at this utterance of a man of warfare. The English gentleman approved, if only out of eagerness to place doña Perla in her mother's arms.
"I'll show you the way!" said Father Serafino, smiting his mule with his slipper. "On to the Hacienda of Monte Tesoro, then."