Fortunately, the victorious savages did not attack the little camp. The survivors still had their horses, of which unknown brutes the Indians had a great fear. For several days the fourteen soldiers and their four half-dead companions camped under the overhanging cliff, where they were safe from missiles from above, hourly expecting an onslaught from the savages. They felt sure that this massacre of their comrades was but the prelude to a general uprising of the twenty-five or thirty thousand Pueblos; and regardless of the danger to themselves, they decided at last to break up into little bands, and separate,--some to follow their commander on his lonely march to Moqui, and warn him of his danger; and others to hasten over the hundreds of arid miles to San Gabriel and the defence of its women and babes, and to the missionaries who had scattered among the savages. This plan of self-devotion was successfully carried out. The little bands of three and four apiece bore the news to their countrymen; and by the end of the year 1598 all the surviving Spaniards in New Mexico were safely gathered in the hamlet of San Gabriel. The little town was built pueblo-fashion, in the shape of a hollow square. In the Plaza within were planted the rude _pedreros_--small howitzers which fired a ball of stone--to command the gates; and upon the roofs of the three-story adobe houses the brave women watched by day, and the men with their heavy flintlocks all through the winter nights, to guard against the expected attack. But the Pueblos rested on their arms. They were waiting to see what Onate would do with Acoma, before they took final measures against the strangers. It was a most serious dilemma in which Onate now found himself. One need not have known half so much about the Indian character as did this gray, quiet Spaniard, to understand that he must signally punish the rebels for the massacre of his men, or abandon his colony and New Mexico altogether. If such an outrage went unpunished, the emboldened Pueblos would destroy the last Spaniard. On the other hand, how could he hope to conquer that impregnable fortress of rock? He had less than two hundred men; and only a small part of these could be spared for the campaign, lest the other Pueblos in their absence should rise and annihilate San Gabriel and its people. In Acoma there were full three hundred warriors, reinforced by at least a hundred Navajo braves.