Still, during this very time of comparative prosperity, a storm was brewing in New Mexico, from whose effects its sedentary Indians never recovered. This was the great rebellion of 1680. The Indians of Pecos claim to have remained neutral during that bloody massacre, and I am inclined to believe their statements. Nevertheless, it is a positive fact that, on the 10th of August of the aforesaid year, their priest, Fray Fernando de Velasco, was murdered and their church sacked.[165] By whom, then, was it done? The reply is intimated by the place where the great bell was found, and by the events intervening between 1680 and 1692, when Diego de Vargas recaptured Santa Fé. It will be remembered that the bell was left on the slope of the high mesa towards the S.W., in the rocky and desolate gorge descending towards the pueblo San Cristóbal, the old home of the Tanos tribe.[166] Father José Amanda Niel writes, about twenty-five or thirty years after the rebellion, that the Tanos secured the greatest part of the booty, among which were bells (_campanas_).[167] That this bell was not carried to the high _mesa_ by the Pecos I believe I have proved; its proximity to the Tanos village, and its actual position in the _cañada_ leading towards the latter, shows that it was either to be carried down to it or carried up from it. If it is (as current report has it) the bell of Pecos, then it was a trophy which the Tanos secured when they, on the 10th of August, 1680, committed the atrocities at the pueblo of Pecos; and this would make it extremely probable, also, that the slaughter of Father Velasco was accompanied by that partial destruction of the buildings _A_ and B_,_ which I have described, and which appears to have been partly repaired by means of material taken from the church, and of adobe containing wheat-straw. This is rendered more likely by the events subsequent to the driving out of the Spaniards, and it does not appear that the Pecos Indians took any part even in their expulsion.