no wonder that they fell victims, with such predispositions to disease.

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.




CHAPTER XIX.


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