At San Vincente, where Walker had left in March a party of eighteen men to guard the barracks, he found not one remaining. A dozen had deserted, and the rest, unsuspicious of danger, had been swooped upon by a band of mounted Mexicans, who lassoed and tortured them to death. So many successive reverses sealed the fate of the expedition. To wait for reinforcements, even could they have come, from California was hopeless. Walker had but thirty-five men remaining. They were destitute of everything but ammunition and weapons; of these they had more than enough. At various places they had buried boxes of carbines and pistols. Eight guns were spiked at San Vincente. A hundred kegs of powder were cached on the banks of the Rio Colorado. Years afterwards the peon herdsmen or prowling Cucupa Indian stumbled, in the mountain by-paths, over the bleaching skeleton of some nameless one whose resting-place was marked by no cross or cairn, but the Colt's revolver rusting beside his bones bespoke his country and his occupation--the only relic of the would-be Conquistadores of the nineteenth century. The stolid native who had sworn fealty to the mushroom republic, under pain of imprisonment for refusal, easily forgot his oath when the accursed "Gringo" had turned his back. The _rancherio_, whose sole mementos of vanished horses and cattle were the bonds of the Republic of Sonora, vainly proffered those securities at the cock-pit and the monté-table. The American of the North had come and gone like a pestilence, or like his ante-type of buccaneering days; nought remained save disappointed ambition with the one, and a bitter memory with the other. The invasion was every way inexcusable. That his interference was unwelcome to the natives Walker soon found out; nor was he slow to learn that nothing less formidable than an army of occupation, backed by a strong power, could push his cherished dream of a new conquest of Mexico beyond the unsubstantial realms of fantasy.