The year 1849 was quite a tough one for Lucio. His father was wanted by the Mexican police on charges of leading a gang which was responsible for more than a few stage-coach robberies. A reward of $1,000 on his head (dead or alive) meant that he was bound to be snagged by one or the other bounty hunters. And as luck would have it, his father fell off his horse in a drunken stupor and hit his head on a rock and died in the middle of nowhere. To rub salt on the family’s wounds, one of his uncles took custody of his father’s corpse and handed it to the police to claim the bounty.
As if this wasn’t enough, his mother who used to work in one of the saloons in one of the border towns of Mexico was killed, caught in the cross-fire between two warring gangs of cowboys. Lucio was all of 16 yrs old, without anybody to call family. He had two choices now – one was to stay back and join one of the many cowboy gangs and eke out a living on a ranch and the other was to cross the American border and try his luck there.
Given his previous experiences with Lady Luck and the fact that she almost never deigned to smile on him all these years, Lucio decided to flip a coin to decide his fate. And based on the eagle with a snake in its mouth that stared back at him from the coin, he decided that he would cross the border and test the waters in America.
These were the days immediately after the Mexican-American war which ended in 1848. Going across the border was next to impossible in these days. Despite this he joined the thin line of stragglers headed for the Texan border with the hope that he would slip past the American line of guards and get into the ‘promised land’ of Texas where he would get a fresh lease of life. After all America was the melting pot of cultures, people and everybody got a second chance at life in that great nation, or at least that’s what most people living in Mexico believe in those days.
But Lucio’s woes continued to follow him there as well. While he successfully managed to slip past the first line of guards and swam across the Rio Grande and set foot in Texas, his group was confronted by an entire platoon of guards on horse back who promptly arrested the entire group of immigrants and put them in a wooden wagon which was headed straight to the court house. The usual system was to have a ‘dummy trial’ for these immigrants and send them back to Mexico across the border.
The only thing that saved Lucio and his fellow prisoners from this fate was the fact that one of the horses pulling the wagon collapsed due to the heat and suddenly fell down. This caused a panic among the other horses who immediately started rearing causing the wagon to be separated from the horses. While the two guards in charge of the wagon started riding after the horses to bring them back, Lucio and a few others managed to wedge the door of the wagon open and escaped into the woods adjoining the path they were being led on.
After three long days of scraping their way out of the woods, Lucio and his two newfound friends found themselves at the foot of a canyon, which had a shallow but wide river running through it. Given that they had not eaten or drunk water for three days now, all three of them ran to the water and jumped straight into it. The refreshing coolness of the water ensured that their thirst was quenched and their hopes were given a big boost.
When Lucio finally managed to get back some of his sanity, he suddenly noticed something gleaming in the water. At first he thought it was just the reflection of the sunlight hitting the water at a particular angle and didn’t pay too much attention to it. But then, he noticed that the gleam continued even when he changed his position. He went closer to the spot where the water gleamed and to his surprise he saw that the origin of the gleam was the fact that there were gold nuggets in the riverbed. And since the river was very shallow at this particular point, these nuggets could easily be recovered from the water.
At long last, after all these years of searching for Lady Luck to smile on him, he found her at the bottom of the canyon.
America indeed was the land where Lucio’s destiny would change forever and make all his dreams come true.
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This story has been set in a historical backdrop with The Mexican American war and The California Gold Rush forming a major part of the narrative. However, these facts have been embellished with quite a bit of fiction and consequently any resemblance to people living or dead is unintentional and purely coincidental.
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This post has been written as part of the Write Now Prompt for August 27, 2013 where the post had to include – And then, at the bottom of the canyon, he found her.
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Image courtesy : http://images.fineartamerica.com/images-medium/the-king-on-his-throne-evelyne-boynton-grierson.jpg
