Page:California Inter Pocula.djvu/760

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for better position. This continued for nearly an hour before either was wounded. Finally, after they had advanced to within a few yards of each other, the mission Indian contrived to drive an arrow through his adversary's heart.

Goscolo's death was the signal for the resumption of the suspended battle, and his disheartened followers soon succumbed. Peha caused G6scolo's head to be brought to him, and with his own hands affixing it to his lance, carried it to the mission of San Jose, where he ordered it nailed to a tree in front of the church door, and there it remained for two or three months. After Goscolo's death there was a notable diminution of Indian depredations in the San Jose jurisdiction.

Fremont and Mason, while at Angeles in 1847, indulged in the pastime of making faces and calling each other bad names. Fremont did not like Mason over him as master, and Mason did not admire Fremont's behavior as subordinate. Fremont thought Mason's plan was to provoke a challenge, and then to kill him with a shotgun, in the use of which Mason was very expert, while Fremont was not. Fremont then studied patience, but that was worse than the shot-gun; his distempered thoughts at length broke into violent words, and almost before he knew it, trial by shotgun was upon him. Then swiftly passed death-missives to and fro, and a fearful preparation for combat, when General Kearny placed his veto upon the sanguinary frolic, and the soil of California was spared the threatened draught of bad blood.

Joshua W. Collett, captain in the United States army, was slain in a duel in Mexico in 1848. In December of this year Salvador Nieto was condemned to six months' public labor by a jury of six of his countrymen for challenging Nicolas Silvas to combat and firing a pistol at him. Silvas was subjected to three months' labor for accepting the challenge.

At Eureka in 1850 the somewhat stale play of a