rnia like fire on a chaparral
hillside when the wind is high, he gained a dark fame, so lasting that
there is hardly an old settled community from Mount Shasta to the
Mexican line which has not some tale of the bandit, Joaquin Murieta.

Sometimes during the weeks after the lynching a miner on his way to
the gambling-houses after supper got a glimpse of Joaquin Murieta in
the outskirts of Murphy's Diggings, as he glided among the tents
cloaked to his eyes in his serape. Occasionally a late reveler,
returning to his cabin in the darkness, was startled by the sight of
his figure beside the road, as black and silent as the night itself;
or was chilled to dead sobriety by the vision of that drawn face
confronting him on a narrow trail. And in the chilly mornings men
going to their work came on the bodies of his victims in the soft red
dust of path or wagon-track, or stumbled over them in the chaparral.

And now fear began to seize the survivors of that lynching party. By
the time its twenty members had dwindled to something like a dozen,
the succession of spectacles afforded by the companions whom they had
been summoned to identify was getting on the stoutest nerves; the
dullest imaginations were working feverishly. Some found friends to
act as body-guards; others moved away to try their fortunes in new
camps; but the body-guards could not be on duty all the time and the
departing ones in most instances made the mistake of confiding their
intentions to acquaintances. All authorities agree that Joaquin
Murieta managed to kill at least fifteen--and possibly two or three
more--of the score whose faces he had so carefully imprinted on his
memory while the lash was biting into his bare back.

When he had finished with the work which the first part of his vow
demanded, he rode away from Murphy's with Rosita and set about the
task of gathering a band that he might be able to carry out the second
half.

There were plenty of cutthroats in California during that spring of
1850, and no lack of Mexicans among them. Several swarthy leaders of
banditti were then operating throughout the State. One of these was
Manuel Garcia, better known as Three-Fingered Jack, who had been
ranging over the Sonoma valley for several years, occasionally varying
the monotony of murder by tying a victim to a tree and flaying him
alive. Joaquin Valenzuela was another, a middle-aged outlaw who had
learned the finer arts of bushwhacking down in Mexico under