A year passed away, and we reach the second half of 1808. The political horizon was beginning to grow overcast; in spite of the care the Spanish government took to isolate the colonies, and prevent European newspapers entering them, the arrival of French troops in Spain was vaguely discussed; minds fermented and attempts at revolt were made in several provinces. Don Aníbal, who at this time was at Leona Vicario, whither he had taken his wife a few months before for her confinement, resolved to leave the town and return to his hacienda. He was the more eager to carry out this resolution because the Indians of the Presidio de Río Grande, only a few leagues from his estate, had risen in revolt, and after burning the fort and massacring the garrison, had spread over the country like a torrent which had burst its dykes, and were plundering and destroying everything they came across. An atrocious fact was stated in connection with the capture of the Río Grande Fort, which heightened the hacendero's apprehensions, by leading him to suppose that his old enemies, the Red Buffaloes, were connected with this sudden insurrection. Count Don Rodrigo de Melgosa, commander of the Presidio, and brother of the governor of the Intendancy, was detested by the Indians, whom he treated with the utmost rigour, and it was rumoured that he had several times been guilty of unjustifiable acts of cruelty and barbarity. When, after a desperate resistance, the Indians stormed the fort, they killed Colonel de Melgosa by pouring molten gold into his mouth, saying that, "Since he was so fond of gold they were determined to make him eat it," and the unhappy man died under horrible sufferings. Then the Indians cut off his head, wrapped it up in a zarapé, and sent this horrible trophy of their victory to the colonel's wife, who happened to be staying with her father-in-law at Mondovo. At the sight of this scalped and fearfully mutilated head, the unhappy woman all but went mad. It was in vain that the governor--whose only son, quite a lad at time, was at the time in the fort with the colonel, and had disappeared, carried off by the Indians, or, as was more probable, had been sacrificed to their implacable vengeance--tried by all the means in his power to discover the man who had undertaken to deliver this horrible message; all his researches were fruitless, and the unhappy father, a prey to impotent despair, remained in the most perfect ignorance as to the fate of his child. Strange to say, the murderers had designed on the victim's forehead a buffalo with their scalping knives. Don Aníbal knew that the buffalo was the totem, or emblem of the Indian tribe which he had so brutally expelled from his domain a year previously, hence his anxiety was great, for it was evident to him that the Red Buffaloes were the authors of the death of the unfortunate Colonel de Melgosa, and of the rape of his nephew.