night long and the excitement attending their comings and
goings lasted into Monday. So there were few on hand to watch the
departure of a schooner for San Francisco that morning.

She left the levee with her crew of three and with two passengers,
miners from San Andreas who were taking out about twenty thousand
dollars in gold-dust. The crew let out the sails, the canvas bellied
before the easy breeze, the schooner glided down the reed-lined slough
whose smooth waters held her reflection like a mirror. Flocks of wild
fowl rose before her as she came along.

A rowboat shot out of the tulles just ahead of her. The helmsman took
one look at the five men in the little craft and dropped his tiller to
pick up a double-barreled shotgun. He shouted to the sailors; they
sprang for weapons, and the two miners in the cabin leaped up the
companion stairs, their pistols in their hands. Before the foremost
was half-way up the flight the shooting had begun; he gained the deck
in time to see the body of the helmsman drooping over the swinging
tiller, overhung by a thin white cloud of powder-smoke. The small boat
lay alongside with a dead man huddled between the thwarts. The other
four bandits were swarming over the rail, firing at the sailors on
the forward deck as they came.

It was a short fight and sharp. When it ended every man in the ship's
company was lying dead or mortally wounded and two of the robbers were
killed. Murieta and Three-Fingered Jack lingered aboard long enough to
lower the gold-dust overside into the small boat and set fire to the
schooner; and the pillar of black smoke drew horsemen from Stockton in
time to hear the story which the dying men gasped out.

Up in Sacramento where the State legislature was considering the
extermination of Joaquin Murieta some weeks later the Stockton
incident was used by a lean and wind-browned lobbyist as an argument
for a company of rangers, and this argument by Captain Harry Love had
much to do with the passage of the bill authorizing such a body under
his leadership.

From Stockton the two companies of bandits fled southward up the San
Joaquin valley and brought more than fifty thousand dollars in
gold-dust to Arroyo Cantoova. Then Murieta took seventy men and rode
back to make his final raid on the placer camps. Three-Fingered Jack
went by his side: the only human being whose companionship he shared.
What talks those two men had together one can only guess from the
natur