wed a little group of Mexicans standing at some
distance listening in frightened silence to what he was saying. He
spoke to the dead man in the open grave; and when events that followed
brought the words back to their minds some of these auditors repeated
the vow he made: to color that knife-blade and his hands bright red
with the blood of twenty men of Murphy's Diggings; and after that to
devote his life to killing Americans.

This was the monte-dealer's new job, and in order to understand how he
came to undertake such a piece of work it is necessary to go back a
little.

He was only nineteen, but life had been moving so swiftly with him
that the beginning of these events finds him in that year overseer of
his father's great rancho down in Sonora, a Mexican of the better
class, well educated as education went in those days, a good dancer as
every girl in the section could bear witness, pleasure-loving,
easy-going, and able to play the guitar very prettily. Sometimes--and
more often as the weeks went by--he played and sang at the home of
Reyes Feliz, a packer in his father's employ; and Rosita, the packer's
daughter, liked his music well enough to encourage his visits.

Class counted then, as it does to this day in Mexico, and parents
liked to have a hand in marriages. But Reyes Feliz was away from home
a great deal with his train of mules, the landholder was busy at his
own affairs; the girl was a beauty and the landholder's son had a
winsome way with him. So one night Rosita took the horse which he
brought for her and rode off with him to California.

They made their journey with their mounts and a single pack animal
across the hot plains and arid mountains of the south, then up the
long King's Highway which the padres had beaten down nearly one
hundred years before their time. It was winter and California winter
means Eastern spring; green grass rippling in the soft breezes,
poppy-fields and a rioting of meadow-larks to make their honeymoon
ideal. They rode on northward into the Santa Clara valley where a
gleaming mist of mustard blossoms hung under the great live oaks as
far as the eye could reach; then they struck off eastward across the
Coast Range and the flat lands of the San Joaquin, to climb into the
red foot-hills where the Stanislaus comes out from the Sierras. Here
they settled down and took a mining claim.

The feeling engendered by the Mexican War still rankled in many
neighborhoods; and every minin