Otermín had sent, some weeks earlier, a troop of thirty men under Pedro de Leiva to meet Ayeta at El Paso and give him necessary convoy for his supply train up river. Under the changed condition of affairs Ayeta hurried Leiva off with a part of the train to succor such fugitives as might be yet alive. Also an Indian runner was sent ahead with a letter to García informing him of the coming of the relief train. García was found at Fray Cristóbal on September 4, and sent the runners back the same day with messages for Father Ayeta. While these men were resting on a mountain off the main road they espied Leiva coming up the river. After signalling to him that the lower camp was but nine leagues farther on, the messengers went on their way and carried to Ayeta his first news that not all the settlers in the north were dead. Ayeta was the real savior of the refugee colonists. As soon as he had despatched the messengers to Otermín, he busied himself “at El Paso in making meal, hardtack, cocinas and bullets.”[84] In response to further requests from Otermín he, a little later, attempted to go to El Paso. The river was in flood and to cross it at “the ford” was impossible. The slow progress of the mule wagons on the west shore of the river was a discouragement, and on the morning of September 18, Ayeta determined to risk the supplies by fording the swollen tide. But the water was deeper and more dangerous than was foreseen and in mid-stream the wagon stuck fast. Ayeta, whose very life was in danger, cut loose the mules, and they gained the shore. Otermín’s men, by now arrived upon the east bank, saw the desperate plight of the heroic Father, swam out to the wagon and bore him on their shoulders to safety. This was at a halting-place named La Salineta. Hackett says Ácoma at this period was the largest of all the Keresan pueblos, having a population of about fifteen hundred Indians, but “too far removed from the sphere of activity of the valley pueblos to exert much, if any, influence upon them,” and, according to the Spanish documents of 1680, it was also too far to coöperate successfully in the revolt. However, “Otermín learned from the Indian besiegers of Santa Fé that all the Spaniards there were dead.”[85] We may be sure that although the Ácomas, because of their remoteness from the centre of the great revolt, played no very conspicuous part in it, they were in full sympathy with the movement, for we are told that they burned all the emblems of Christianity, putting to death in some nameless fashion, their priest, a Franciscan padre, Lucas Maldonado.[86]