ng the jury found that he had been
killed by some person or persons unknown, and let it go at that.

Two weeks later I had occasion to go to Tucson, and on tying my horse
outside the Italian Brothers' saloon, noticed a man I thought looked
familiar sitting on the bench outside. As I came up he pulled his hat
over his face so that I could not see it. I went inside, ordered a
drink, and looked in the mirror. It gave a perfect reflection of the man
outside, and I saw that he was the Mexican Fernando, whom the Chinese
gardener had hired when I had engaged Mabot. I had my suspicions right
then as to who had killed the Chinaman, but, having nothing by which to
prove them, I was forced to let the matter drop.

Two or three years after this I hired as vaquero a Mexican named
Neclecto, who after a year quit work and went for a visit to Nogales.
Neclecto bought his provisions from the Chinaman who kept the store I
had built on the ranch, and so, as we were responsible for the debt,
when Bob Bloxton, son-in-law of Sanford, came to pay the Mexican off, he
did so in the Chinaman's store.

The next morning Neclecto accompanied Bloxton to the train, and, looking
back, Bob saw, the Mexican and another man ride off in the direction of
the ranch. After it happened Neclecto owned up that he had been in the
Chinaman's that night drinking, but insisted that he had left without
any trouble with the yellow-skinned storekeeper. But from that day
onward the Chinaman was never seen again.

Bloxton persuaded me to return to the ranch from Nogales and we visited
the Chinaman's house, where we found the floor dug up as though somebody
had been hunting treasure. My wife found a $10 gold piece hidden in a
crack between the 'dobe bricks and later my son, John, unearthed twelve
Mexican dollars beneath some manure in the hen-coop. Whether this had
belonged to the Chinaman, Louey, who had disappeared, or to another
Chinaman who had been staying with him, we could not determine. At any
rate, we found no trace of Louey or his body.

Even this was not to be the end of the strange series of fatalities to
Chinamen on the Sanford ranch. In 1897 I quit the Sanford foremanship
after working for my employer seventeen years, and turned the ranch over
to Amos Bloxton, another son-in-law of Sanford. I rented agricultural
land from Sanford and fell to farming. Near my place Crazy John, a
Chinaman, had his gardens, where he made 'dobe bricks besides growing
produ