I
The Miraculous Escape
“The name of the river is Los Brazos de Dios, which is to say, The Arms of God.
“The bed of it is very deep; and the color of the water—when it creeps sluggishly along between its banks, so shallow in places that the blue heron may wade it without wetting his knees—is the color of tarnished brass. But when it comes roaring down from the far-away Redlands, a solid foam-crested wall, leaping upward a foot a minute, and spreading death and destruction into the outlying lowlands, then it is as red as spilled blood.
“On its banks, more than a century and a half ago, a handful of barefoot Franciscan friars, who had prayed and fought their way across the country from Mexico, founded the Presidio of St. Jago, and corralled within the boundary walls a flock of Yndios reducidos.
“There were the stately church, cloistered and towered and rose-windowed—a curious flower of architecture abloom in the savage wilderness—and the blockhouse with its narrow loopholes, and the hut into which the Indian women were thrust at night under lock and key.
“The mighty forest and open prairies around teemed with Yndios bravos, who hated the burly, cassocked, fighting monks, and their own Christianized tribesmen.
“These came, in number like the leaves of the live oak, to hurl themselves against the Presidio. And, after many days of hard [[213]]fighting, the single friar who remained alive turned his eyes away from the demolished church, and, under cover of smoke from the burning blockhouse, led the remnant of Yndios reducidos (who because they had learned to pray had not forgotten how to fight) out of the enclosure by a little postern-gate, and down the steep bank to the yellow thread of the river below.
“Midway of the stream—thridding the ankle-deep water—they were, before the red devils above discovered their flight. The demoniac yell from a thousand throats pushed them like a battering ram up the opposite bank, whence, looking back, they saw the bed of the River Tockonhono swarming with their foes. Then the Yndios reducidos opened their lips and began to chant the death-song of the Nainis; and the friar, lifting his hand, commended their souls and his own to the God who gives and who takes away.
“But, lo, a miracle!
“Even as the waves of the Red Sea—opened by the rod of Moses for the passage of his people—closed upon Pharaoh and his host, so, with the hoarse roar of a wild beast springing upon his prey, the foam-crested wall of water fell upon the Yndios bravos, and not a warrior of them all came forth from the river bed but as a bruised and beaten corpse.
“So the friar, falling on his knees, gave thanks. And the river, which was the Tockonhono, became from that day Los Brazos de Dios, which is to say, The Arms of God.
“Such is the legend of the river.”