and in order that the Moros should not harass me by cutting off the heads of the wounded men, I had to escort them as far as the fort of San Francisco Xabiel, which had been gained below. I reached it at night, with the troops discouraged, and reduced to the small number that I have mentioned to your Majesty. On this occasion I had not the support of Sargento-mayor Nicolas Gomez and his men--who went as the rearguard, on account of pains in his legs--although he had not more than three leguas to go from four o'clock in the morning to eleven, when the battle commenced. They were reconnoitering, carrying Nicolas Gomez in a hammock because he could not, on account of his foot, climb paths so rugged. He did not come back until the morning of the next day, when I had sent eighty men who survived from the vanguard, to which Nicolas Gomez had to go, setting out as soon as the men had heard mass. They went at that time because the enemy had not fortified the rear of the hill. Captain Gastelu, who led Nicolas Gomez's vanguard, gained a good position, and killed some Moros who were defending a passage across which they had only felled a tree. Captain Gastelu passed this obstruction, and gained the top of the hill and the rear of the king's main stronghold, where he had his house, and four pieces of artillery. Of these, one was bronze, with your Majesty's arms on it, carrying an eight-libra ball; the three others were of cast iron, for six- and eight-libra balls. They were loaded up to the mouth with balls, chains, and spikes, in order [to destroy us] if we had gone up the hill by that route, on which the guide whom I took with me had already started us. But God influenced my choice, in order that we should go by the other road; for although I did not get off very cheaply, yet by this road it would have cost me far more dear. At the time when we were fighting above on the seventeenth of March, the eve of St. Joseph's day, the eighty men whom I sent with Captain Rodrigo de Guillestigui, my alférez, arrived at the foot of the hill on this other side; and, as a result of the pious haste which Father Marcelo Mastrilo used in saying mass in order that we might pursue our march, the news was soon brought to me that the Moros had flung themselves down from their heights in flight, and that your Majesty's banners were flying over their three forts and our chaplains singing the _Te Deum laudamus_. Other arms were secured there--twelve or thirteen versos, and more than a hundred arquebuses and muskets; everything else was given to the soldiers as booty, as a reward for their labors. Thus your Majesty gained a victory, as others will write you. As the king, Cachil Corralat, is very influential in those regions, I have made public an offer to give three thousand pesos for his head. The captives and his wife's servants tell me that the king was wounded in an arm by a musket-ball; with that, I understand, he will not be able to keep up his people's