iners to his feet. He fell forward in the instant of his
rising, and the woods gave back a hundred crashing echoes to the
volley which the bandits fired. Their aim was so true--for they had
stolen close in and taken good time to settle themselves before
cocking their weapons--that when the echoes died away fifteen men
were lying dead and dying in the red light of that fire.

The others were springing for their pistols, for nearly every one of
the miners had laid aside his belt to ease himself, but before one of
them had pulled a trigger there came the crackling of a second
fusillade and seven fell. Then Boyce and two of his companions leaped
outside that fatal circle of radiance in time to save themselves. As
they were creeping away in the darkness they saw Joaquin Murieta and
Three-Fingered Jack rush into the camp waving their bowie-knives
exultantly above their heads, and for a long time afterward they heard
the band whooping like Apaches while they killed the wounded.

Murieta and his company rode away from this massacre with thirty
thousand dollars in gold-dust and about forty horses as their loot.
But the story which Boyce and the other two survivors told turned the
mining towns into armed camps; and now Sheriff Charles Ellis of
Calaveras County started so fierce a warfare against the bandits that
they had to flee the country.

When Murieta rode back to Arroyo Cantoova that spring, a closely
hunted fugitive, he found that Rosita had deserted him for an American
settler by the name of Baker. Even at this critical period when he was
beginning actual preparations for his enormous raid he took the time
to track her to a cabin among the hills nearly a hundred miles from
the rendezvous. He shot her down and set fire to the place, but
perhaps the very frenzy of his anger blinded him or perhaps he rushed
away in horror of his own deed, for she survived her wounds, the only
one of his victims who lived when he had the time to kill, and showed
the scars to officers years afterward.

The boy who had taken her northward so short a time ago--for his years
were barely a man's years yet--rode back to Arroyo Cantoova and the
one thing he had in life--his plan.

* * * * *

Captain Harry Love and his company of twenty rangers rode down the
King's Highway into the little town of San Juan. In the plaza, where
the California poppies bloom to-day before the cloistered arches of
the missio