n as they bloomed on that July afternoon in 1853, the dusty
horsemen drew rein outside the old adobe inn. Their captain dismounted
and went inside and while he stayed the others lounged in their deep
stock saddles smoking cigarettes or eased the cinches to rest their
sweaty horses; a sunburned troop and silent as men who know they have
large work ahead of them.

An hour passed and Captain Love came out, to swing into his saddle and
ride off without a word with the twenty behind him. They followed the
King's Highway where it looped upward along the flanks of San Juan
Hill, came down the other side into the Salinas valley--the Salinas
plains, men called it then--and made camp near the river.

That night Captain Love told them what he had learned in the Plaza Inn
at San Juan where Joaquin Murieta had often come to confer with
friendly Spanish Californians in other days. One of these former
friends had betrayed to him the rendezvous at Arroyo Cantoova and
told him how to reach the place by a pass across the Coast Range near
Paso Robles.

The ranger company rode on southward day after day until the
wind-swept plain grew narrower between oak-dotted hills; then turned
eastward to climb among a tangle of grassy mountains scorched by the
sun to the color of a lion's coat. They crossed the divide and
descended into the upper valley of the San Joaquin. And one morning,
when they were following the trail of several horsemen, they saw the
thin smoke of a little camp-fire rising from the ravine-bed ahead of
them. Captain Love deployed his company to close in on the place from
three sides, and sent one man to the rear with orders to hang back
until the others had all ridden in. The man was William Byrnes who had
known Joaquin Murieta well in the days before that lynching at
Murphy's Diggings.

* * * * *

Murieta was washing his thoroughbred mare in the bed of the ravine.
She stood, without halter or tie-rope, as docile as a dog while he
laved her fine limbs with a dampened cloth. His saddle lay about ten
or fifteen yards away with his pistols in the holsters beside the
horn. Four or five bandits were cooking their breakfast over the fire;
and Three-Fingered Jack lay at a little distance, sprawled full-length
in the morning sunshine like a basking rattlesnake. The mare raised
her head; her ears went forward, and Murieta glanced up in time to see
the rangers riding in across the pale saffr