They were Diegueños. They were armed with short bows and they drew about the travelers and knelt and gave them water out of a gourd. They’d seen such pilgrims before and with sufferings more terrible. They eked a desperate living from that land and they knew that nothing excepting some savage pursuit could drive men to such plight and they watched each day for that thing to gather itself out of its terrible incubation in the house of the sun and muster along the edge of the eastern world and whether it be armies or plague or pestilence or something altogether unspeakable they waited with a strange equanimity.
They led the refugees into their camp at San Felipe, a collection of crude huts made from reeds and housing a population of filthy and beggarly creatures dressed largely in the cotton shirts of the argonauts who’d passed there, shirts and nothing more. They fetched them a stew of lizards and pocketmice hot in clay bowls and a sort of piñole made from dried and pounded grasshoppers and they crouched about and watched them with great solemnity as they ate.
One reached and touched the grips of the pistol in the kid’s belt and drew back again. Pistola, he said.
The kid ate.
The savages nodded.
Quiero mirar su pistola, the man said.
The kid didnt answer. When the man reached for the pistol he intercepted his hand and put it from him. When he turned loose the man reached again and the kid pushed his hand away again.
The man grinned. He reached a third time. The kid set the bowl between his legs and drew the pistol and cocked it and put the muzzle against the man’s forehead.
They sat quite still. The others watched. After a while the kid lowered the pistol and let down the hammer and put it in his belt and picked up the bowl and commenced eating again. The man gestured toward the pistol and spoke to his friends and they nodded and then they sat as before.
Qué pasó con ustedes.
The kid watched the man over the rim of the bowl with his dark and hollow eyes.
The indian looked at the expriest.
Qué pasó con ustedes.
The expriest in his black and crusted cravat turned his whole torso to look at the man who’d spoken. He looked at the kid. He’d been eating with his fingers and he licked them and wiped them on the filthy leg of his trousers.
Las Yumas, he said.
They sucked in air and clucked their tongues.
Son muy malos, said the speaker.
Claro.
No tiene compañeros?
The kid and the expriest eyed each other.
Si, said the kid. Muchos. He waved his hand to the east. Llegaran. Muchos compañeros.
The indians received this news without expression. A woman brought more of the piñole but they had been without food too long to have appetites and they waved her away.
In the afternoon they bathed in the creek and slept on the ground. When they woke they were being watched by a group of naked children and a few dogs. When they went up through the camp they saw the indians sitting along a ledge of rock watching tirelessly the land to the east for whatever might come out of it. No one spoke to them of the judge and they did not ask. The dogs and children followed them out of the camp and they took the trail up into the low hills to the west where the sun was already going.
They reached Warner’s Ranch late the following day and they restored themselves at the hot sulphur springs there. There was no one about. They moved on. The country to the west was rolling and grassy and beyond were mountains running to the coast. They slept that night among dwarf cedars and in the morning the grass was frozen and they could hear the wind in the frozen grass and they could hear the cries of birds that seemed a charm against the sullen shores of the void out of which they had ascended.
All that day they climbed through a highland park forested with joshua trees and rimmed about by bald granite peaks. In the evening flocks of eagles went up through the pass before them and they could see on those grassy benches the great shambling figures of bears like cattle grazing on some upland heath. There were skifts of snow in the lee of the stone ledges and in the night a light snow fell upon them. Reefs of mist were blowing across the slopes when they set out shivering in the dawn and in the new snow they saw the tracks of the bears that had come down to take their wind just before daylight.
That day there was no sun only a paleness in the haze and the country was white with frost and the shrubs were like polar isomers of their own shapes. Wild rams ghosted away up those rocky draws and the wind swirled down cold and gray from the snowy reeks above them, a smoking region of wild vapors blowing down through the gap as if the world up there were all afire. They spoke less and less between them until at last they were silent altogether as is often the way with travelers approaching the end of a journey. They drank from the cold mountain streams and bathed their wounds and they shot a young doe at a spring and ate what they could and smoked thin sheets of the meat to carry with them. Although they saw no more bears they saw sign of their vicinity and they moved off over the slopes a good mile from their meatcamp before they put down for the night. In the morning they crossed a bed of thunderstones clustered on that heath like the ossified eggs of some primal groundbird. They trod the shadowline under the mountains keeping just in the sun for the warmth of it and that afternoon they first saw the sea, far below them, blue and serene under clouds.
The trail went down through the low hills and picked up the wagontrack and they followed where the locked wheels had skidded and the iron tires scarred the rock and the sea down there darkened to black and the sun fell and all the land about went blue and cold. They slept shivering under a wooded boss among owlcries and a scent of juniper while the stars swarmed in the bottomless night.
It was evening of the following day when they entered San Diego. The expriest turned off to find them a doctor but the kid wandered on through the raw mud streets and out past the houses of hide in their rows and across the gravel strand to the beach.
Loose strands of ambercolored kelp lay in a rubbery wrack at the tideline. A dead seal. Beyond the inner bay part of a reef in a thin line like something foundered there on which the sea was teething. He squatted in the sand and watched the sun on the hammered face of the water. Out there island clouds emplaned upon a salmoncolored othersea. Seafowl in silhouette. Downshore the dull surf boomed. There was a horse standing there staring out upon the darkening waters and a young colt that cavorted and trotted off and came back.
He sat watching while the sun dipped hissing in the swells. The horse stood darkly against the sky. The surf boomed in the dark and the sea’s black hide heaved in the cobbled starlight and the long pale combers loped out of the night and broke along the beach.
He rose and turned toward the lights of the town. The tidepools bright as smelterpots among the dark rocks where the phosphorescent seacrabs clambered back. Passing through the salt grass he looked back. The horse had not moved. A ship’s light winked in the swells. The colt stood against the horse with its head down and the horse was watching, out there past men’s knowing, where the stars are drowning and whales ferry their vast souls through the black and seamless sea.
XXII
Under arrest – The judge pays a call – An arraignment – Soldier, priest, magistrate – On his own recognizance – He sees a surgeon – The arrowshaft removed from his leg – Delirium – He journeys to Los Angeles – A public hanging – Los ahorcados – Looking for the expriest – Another fool – The scapular – To Sacramento – A traveler in the west – He abandons his party – The penitent brothers – The deathcart – Another massacre – The eldress in the rocks.