The rock was captured, but the town remained. A pueblo is a fortress in itself; and now Zaldivar had to storm Acoma house by house, room by room. The little _pedrero_ was dragged in front of the first row of houses, and soon began to deliver its slow fire. As the adobe walls crumbled under the steady battering of the stone cannon-balls, they only formed great barricades of clay, which even our modern artillery would not pierce; and each had to be carried separately at the point of the sword. Some of the fallen houses caught fire from their own _fogones_;[14] and soon a stifling smoke hung over the town, from which issued the shrieks of women and babes and the defiant yells of the warriors. The humane Zaldivar made every effort to save the women and children, at great risk of self; but numbers perished beneath the falling walls of their own houses. [Illustration: RUINS OF CHURCH AT PECOS. _See page 161._] This fearful storming lasted until noon of January 24. Now and then bands of warriors made sorties, and tried to cut their way through the Spanish line. Many sprang in desperation over the cliff, and were dashed to pieces at its foot; and two Indians who made that incredible leap survived it as miraculously as had the four Spaniards in the earlier massacre, and made their escape. At last, at noon of the third day, the old men came forth to sue for mercy, which was at once granted. The moment they surrendered, their rebellion was forgotten and their treachery forgiven. There was no need of further punishment. The ringleaders in the murder of Zaldivar's brother were all dead, and so were nearly all the Navajo allies. It was the most bloody struggle New Mexico ever saw. In this three days' fight the Indians lost five hundred slain and many wounded; and of the surviving Spaniards not one but bore to his grave many a ghastly scar as mementos of Acoma. The town was so nearly destroyed that it had all to be rebuilt; and the infinite labor with which the patient people had brought up that cliff on their backs all the stones and timber and clay to build a many-storied town for nearly a thousand souls was all to be repeated. Their crops, too, and all other supplies, stored in dark little rooms of the terraced houses, had been destroyed, and they were in sore want. Truly a bitter punishment had been sent them by "those above" for their treachery to Juan de Zaldivar. When his men had sufficiently recovered from their wounds Vicente de Zaldivar, the leader of probably the most wonderful capture in history, marched victorious back to San Gabriel de los Espanoles, taking with him eighty young Acoma girls, whom he sent to be educated by the nuns in Old Mexico. What a shout must have gone up from the gray walls of the little colony when its anxious watchers saw at last the wan and unexpected tatters of its little army pricking slowly homeward across the snows on jaded steeds!