wasn’t important anyway. Maybeso these here Injuns got a good notion when all’s said an’ done … for what’s truly important still remains long after any of us is gone.”
Coltrane turned and gazed at Bass’s face, then the once-mute man spoke for the first time in many weeks. “What’s important to you?”
Initially startled by the reticent man’s sudden speech, Titus finally declared, “Kin, Roscoe. Kinfolk, and what few friends I can count on.”
Three more days passed while the white men languished in this unexpected Eden.
During those long, early-summer days most of the men ate or slept or frolicked in the river with some of their newfound female friends. And when night came down, the exuberant trappers stomped and jigged and sang, until they could wait no longer and slipped back into the shadows to couple with one of the Mojave women.
At the fires each evening, Frederico stammered through his poor Spanish, explaining his childhood in California, while Peg-Leg translated haltingly for the others. The young Indian described how in his youth he chose to become a novitiate working in the fields among hundreds of other Indians, all of them living under the rigid strictures of the padres’ church. But the lessons he learned were not the sort that would save his heathen soul from an eternity of damnation. Instead, Frederico, like the hundreds of primitive California Indians living in the hills and vales surrounding every Catholic mission, soon discovered they were nothing more than slaves who toiled in the vineyards, sweated over the extensive fields, tending to virtually every need or whim of the Mexican friars and those soldiers posted nearby.
Growing more and more disillusioned with the cruelty of his religious taskmasters, Frederico determined he would run away to those mountains lying far to the east of the mission. With two companions he escaped during the return of a work detail, the trio managing to hide until nightfall when the three young men started for the distant foothills. But they soon learned that even the foothills and high slopes covered in their evergreens were no sanctuary. Mounted Mexican soldiers caught up to them.
Rather than return to the mission and the torment he would have to suffer, one of the young men threw himself off a rocky ledge, his broken body tumbling into the chasm below. Frederico and his friend were promptly clamped in shackles and turned around for the mission.
When the pair hobbled along too slowly to keep up with the soldiers’ horses, the boys were lashed with braided horsehair quirts. Stumbling and falling constantly, they finally reached the mission, where both collapsed at the feet of the friars—who immediately ordered their most trusted Indian servants to bind the runaways to a pair of posts erected a few yards outside the walls. There a stern, steel-eyed, and militant padre took a rawhide cat-o’- nine-tails from his rope belt and turned the runaways’ backs to ribbons of blood and tattered strips of flesh.
With pooling eyes now, Frederico related how he had passed out with the severity of the flogging, unable to endure the pain or loss of blood any longer. The last sounds he heard were the unearthly cries of his young friend. Later, when he awoke in a cell where his feet were shackled, Frederico asked a friar when he could see his friend. The priest declared that his friend had gone away mysteriously … and would never be coming back.
Yet in his bones, Frederico knew that last part was nothing less than the ugly truth. Few of the escaped slaves ever survived their recapture. Their deaths simply served as a vivid example to the other Indians forced to witness the brutal public flogging of those who attempted to flee their cruel bondage to these self-righteous and most holy Mexican taskmasters.
Not long after Frederico’s recapture, his two young sisters were transferred from the mission, taken away to join a group of women who were consigned to the nearby soldier barracks where they served as concubines for the Mexican cavalry. Overwhelmed with a sense of helplessness, eaten up with utter hopelessness, Frederico realized he alone could do nothing to free his sisters from their fate. All he could do was to attempt another escape. That, or die trying.
This time when he made his dash east to the foothills of those beckoning mountains, he did not tarry to hide among the timber and the boulders. Instead, Frederico scaled the slopes, pushing all the way to the top of a narrow pass, where he gazed down upon that impenetrable desert below him. One last time he peered over his shoulder to the west where lay nothing but a legacy of misery and pain. There wasn’t a thing left for him but torture and death at the hands of his Mexican conquerors if the soldiers ever recaptured him. The young Indian crossed over, pitching himself into the desert.
Discovered near death where he lay huddled in the skimpy shade of a patch of cactus, parched with thirst and unable to move, Frederico was rescued by a few young Mojave warriors who had ventured onto the wastes in search of wild horses, hunting for any branded animals that might have escaped the California missions and extensive ranchos. Taking the half-dead slave to their villages on the Colorado, the Mojave hissed and snarled when Frederico explained why he had such a patchwork of terrible scars across his back and shoulders.
From that day, his rescuers never asked again of the pale-skinned strangers far to the west. The Mojave had saved his life and given him a home.
“Will you guide us back through that pass in the mountain?” Peg-Leg Smith asked Frederico when the young Indian had finished his dramatic tale that third night at the fire.
“You will not be lost,” Frederico replied, wagging of his head with reluctance.
“What do you want to lead us?” Smith inquired. “Tell me what I can give you in trade. We need you to show us the pass through the mountains that will take us to the ranchos.”
This time Frederico shook his head more emphatically. “There is nothing you can give me that would make me take another step across that desert. Nothing in this world that will make me return to the land of my murderous captors.”
In the cool, shadowy dawn that next morning, the booshways had their grumbling men rolling out early, ordered to bring their horses and pack animals into camp. Onto the pack saddles they tied skins filled with horsemeat they had traded from the Mojave. Every man went to the river one last time to fill his gourd or oaken canteen, along with those skin bladders the booshways had purchased from the Indians.
A large group of the Mojave followed their headmen to the visitors’ camp, bearing some last gifts of melons for their guests at this parting. From the front of the crowd stepped young Frederico. Over one shoulder he had tied a rabbit-skin blanket rolled into a cylinder. Over the other was suspended a four-foot section of grayish, greasy horse intestine now swollen with river water and tied off at both ends with a loop of braided twine.
“Wood-Leg,” he called in his imperfect Spanish as he stopped a yard in front of the white leader. “If I show you across the desert and on your way into the mountains … I have thought of one thing you can do to repay me.”
“Tell me,” Smith replied eagerly. “Tell
“I will take your men there—all the way to the ranchos,” Frederico vowed before the stunned white men as the sun just then struck the top of the canyon above them. “If you and your men will help me free my sisters from the Mexican soldiers.”
They put that oasis at their backs.
Frederico led them onto the desert near a grouping of tall, sandstone obelisks,* gigantic, mute monoliths left behind after eons of erosion by wind and water. They reminded Bass of other eerie rock formations he had encountered across the seasons, giants that took shape and somehow grew animated in the last light of the day. Hoodoos, for sure.
Their horses carried them northwest around the base of some dry, forbidding high ground. Stopping among the late-afternoon shadows in the lee of those low mountains, the raiders spent their first night upon what Frederico told them might be the last good grass their horses would have until they reached the far mountains of California.
“The Injun said to save your water here on out,” Bill Williams warned the trappers. “He can’t rightly remember if’n there’s waterholes or not out there. Only come through part of it on his own. The rest of the way the Ammuchabas brung him in.”
The next morning’s march found the horses plodding slower and slower with the rising temperature. But as hard as they were working, the animals didn’t break into a lather. Titus figured the arid, superheated air was relentlessly sucking the moisture right out of the critters the way it was leaching it right out of him.
At midday when the sun sulled overhead like a stubborn mule refusing to budge, Frederico located a small patch of shady Joshua trees.
