It will require many generations to recover the number of Indians which perished in that year; and, as I have said, as long as they live, it will form an epoch or era to which they will for centuries refer.
In the last chapter but one I stated that I and my companions, Gabriel and Roche, had been delivered up to the Mexican agents, and were journeying, under an escort of thirty men, to the Mexican capital, to be hanged as an example to all liberators. This escort was commanded by two most atrocious villains, Joachem Texada and Louis Ortiz. They evidently anticipated that they would become great men in the republic, upon the safe delivery of our persons to the Mexican Government, and every day took good care to remind us that the gibbet was to be our fate on our arrival.
Our route lay across the central deserts of Sonora, until we arrived on the banks of the Rio Grande, and so afraid were they of falling in with a hostile party of Apaches, that they took long turns out of the general track, and through mountainous passes, by which we not only suffered greatly from fatigue, but were very often threatened with starvation.
It was sixty-three days before we crossed the Rio Grande at Christobal, and we had still a long journey before us. This delay, occasioned by the timidity of our guards, proved our salvation. We had been but one day on our march in the swamp after leaving Christobal, when the war-whoop pierced our ears, and a moment afterwards our party was surrounded by some hundred Apaches, who saluted us with a shower of arrows.
Our Mexican guards threw themselves down on the ground, and cried for mercy, offering ransom. I answered the war-whoop of the Apaches, representing my companions and myself as their friends, and requesting their help and protection, which were immediately given. We were once more unbound and free.
I hardly need say that this was a most agreeable change in the state of affairs; for I have no doubt that had we arrived at our destination, we should either have been gibbeted or died (somehow or other) in prison. But if the change was satisfactory to us, it was not so to Joachem Texada and Louis Ortiz, who changed their notes with their change of condition.