ion. For the
water-carrier was James Boyce, who had played monte over the table of
the good-looking young dealer many a night in Murphy's Diggings.

Boyce dropped the buckets of water and, drawing his pistol, "Boys!" he
shouted, "That's Murieta. Shoot him!" Then he fired.

But Murieta had wheeled his horse and was already spurring it on a
dead run down the gulch. The miners were lining their sights on him;
and now the canyon walls echoed to the volley they sent after him.

He gained the trail along the cliff. A bullet knocked off his hat and
his long hair streamed behind him as the horse leaped out on the
narrow path. The rocks spurned by its flying hoofs dropped over the
brink into the roaring stream one hundred feet below. The leaden slugs
that sang about the rider's head chipped bits from the sheer wall
beside him. He drew his bowie-knife and brandished it as high as his
arm could reach.

"I am Murieta," he shouted, turning in the saddle to look back at
them. "Kill me if you can."

The cliff on one side was so close that he scraped it with his stirrup
and on the other side the horse's upflung hoofs hung in mid-air
beyond the brink. The weapons flamed behind him at the canyon-head.
Their bullets rained on the rocks about him as he flourished his knife
in a final gesture of defiance and passed round a turn of the trail
beyond sight of his enemies.

But Boyce and his companions were a hardy crowd, and instead of
letting the incident end here they broke camp the next morning to
follow Murieta's trail. They traced him without much trouble down the
canyon, over a ridge and into another steep-walled gulch, where they
came on tracks of fourteen others of the band. From this point the
robbers had struck off toward the high country.

All that day the miners climbed the tall ridges where the sugar-pines
stood like enormous pillars in the vast cathedral of the out of doors,
until night found them in the midst of the forest right under the bare
granite peaks. Here they made camp, and when the cold breath of the
snow-fields came down upon them they kindled a great fire. They
lounged about the flaming logs smoking their pipes and warming their
wearied limbs. Beyond the circle of firelight the enshadowed woods
gave forth no sound to tell them that fifteen men were crawling
through those black aisles among the trees like fifteen swarthy
snakes.

The click of a pistol-hammer coming to full cock brought one of the
lounging m