The recipient of the news sent one of his family to inform another of his party, and so the news was spread so quietly that the guard scarcely noticed what was going on until the men began slipping one by one into the mesquite thickets. Before he could reach his friends, who were out in the fields, the whole proscribed party had escaped and were on their way toward Santan, where they and their friends attacked their Santan opponents early the next morning.
Juan Thomas, his two brothers, father, and uncle were in the party attacked. The old man, Iĭâs, was the bravest, and fought openly with bow and arrows until they succeeded in driving off their assailants. He was slightly wounded with a bullet in the abdomen and an arrow in the arm, but no one was killed. One of the brothers was irrigating his field when a runner came with the news that his family was being killed and that he was in danger also. He ran toward the Double buttes and soon saw another man running in a course parallel to his own. The other saw him, and both began dodging to escape from the two clumps of mesquite behind which they had halted. Then they discovered that they were brothers, and they debated long as to what they should do. It is also said that they shed tears at the peril of their relatives, to whose aid they could not go without weapons. It was also a cause of grief that their fellows should rise against them. They decided to return to the village, but by that time the fight had ended.
Iĭâs had come out of his house and chased those who were trying to shoot him. They fired several shots and some arrows at him, but when he came near they ran away. He called his enemies by name, inviting them to come and get satisfaction if they were bent on killing him. When the attacking party withdrew, the Thomas family went to the Double buttes, and on finding that they were not pursued they went to Blackwater, where their story so aroused their friends that an expedition was organized to seek revenge. They secured two boxes of cartridges from the trader at Blackwater and came down the river.
They formed a skirmish line as they approached the lower settlement and met their opponents at the Government school building. The Santan party hastily knocked a few loopholes in the adobe walls and gathered in and around the building, to withstand an attack. The Blackwater men killed three among those outside the schoolhouse and could have killed many more with their superior weapons, but their thirst for revenge seemed to be satisfied with that number, and they did not pursue those who fled across the mesa like frightened rabbits.
