As he lay there, faint and helpless, he suddenly heard voices approaching. He concluded that the Indians had trailed him, and gave himself up for lost, for he was too weak to fight. But at last his ear caught the accent of Spain; and though it was spoken by hoarse, rough soldiers, you may be sure he thought it the sweetest sound in all the world. It chanced that the night before, some of the horses of Onate's camp had strayed away, and a small squad of soldiers was sent out to catch them. In following the trail of the runaways, they came in sight of Captain Villagran. Luckily they saw him, for he could no longer shout nor run after them. Tenderly they lifted up the wounded officer and bore him back to camp; and there, under the gentle nursing of bearded men, he slowly recovered strength, and in time became again the daring athlete of other days. He accompanied Onate on that long, desert march; and a few months later was at the storming of Acoma, and performed the astounding feat which ranks as one of the remarkable individual heroisms of the New World. FOOTNOTES: [15] Pronounced Veel-yah-grahn. VI. THE PIONEER MISSIONARIES. To pretend to tell the story of the Spanish pioneering of the Americas without special attention to the missionary pioneers, would be very poor justice and very poor history. In this, even more than in other qualities, the conquest was unique. The Spaniard not only found and conquered, but converted. His religious earnestness was not a whit behind his bravery. As has been true of all nations that have entered new lands,--and as we ourselves later entered this,--his first step had to be to subdue the savages who opposed him. But as soon as he had whipped these fierce grown-children, he began to treat them with a great and noble mercy,--a mercy none too common even now, and in that cruel time of the whole world almost unheard of. He never robbed the brown first Americans of their homes, nor drove them on and on before him; on the contrary, he protected and secured to them by special laws the undisturbed possession of their lands for all time. It is due to the generous and manly laws made by Spain three hundred years ago, that our most interesting and advanced Indians, the Pueblos, enjoy to-day full security in their lands; while nearly all others (who never came fully under Spanish dominion) have been time after time ousted from lands our government had solemnly given to them.