When the West Was Young Part 3

What words pa.s.sed from his lips these others never knew. There was not time for him to utter more than one or two; perhaps to tell his name.

They saw his white teeth flas.h.i.+ng in an unpleasant smile; and Wilson's hand moved toward his gun. But in the middle of that movement the young officer pitched forward on his face. The sharp report of a pistol, the sc.r.a.pe of hoofs, the smell of black powder smoke, and the vision of the rider through the tenuous wreaths as he whirled his horse about--these things came to the dazed witnesses in a sort of blur.

The sound of the shot awakened the drowsing street and many who ran to their doorways saw the murderer riding away at a swinging gallop. Some of these claimed to recognize him as Joaquin Murieta, and in the days that followed their statements were confirmed by captured members of the band.

Deputy Sheriff Wilson's death aroused more men than his words had, and when General Joshua Bean began organizing two companies of militia during the weeks after the murder he found plenty of recruits. The officers were just getting the new companies into shape for an expedition against the bandits who were now ravaging most of the country south of the Tehachapi, when Murieta and Three-Fingered Jack waylaid General Bean one night near San Gabriel Mission, dropped the noose of a reata over his head, dragged him from his horse, and stabbed him through the heart. And the two companies of militia did nothing more.

Now, while posses were foundering their lathered horses on every southland road and the flames of blazing ranch buildings were throwing their red light on the faces of dead men almost every night, a lean and wind-browned Texan by the name of Captain Harry Love took a hand in the grim game of man-hunting.

He had gained his t.i.tle during the Mexican War. As an express-rider for different American generals he had dodged the reatas of guerrilla parties who were lurking by water-holes and had outjockeyed swarthy hors.e.m.e.n in wild races across the flaming deserts of Sonora until he had come to know the science of their fighting as well as old Padre Jurata himself. And when he started after Murieta's men he did his hunting all alone.

One day he ran across the trail of Pedro Gonzales, the horse-thief, and another lieutenant named Juan, and followed it until he overtook the pair at the Buena Ventura rancho. Like most of his Southwestern breed he was a better man at action than at words, and so the story of the gun-fight which took place when he came upon them has never been told; but when the smoke of the three pistols cleared away Gonzales was in custody and Juan was riding hard toward the hills with the blood running over his face from a bullet's furrow along his scalp.

The fugitive found five others of the band in a sun-baked arroyo that night, told them the news of the catastrophe, and got a fresh horse to ride back with them and rescue their companion.

Captain Love was well on his way to Los Angeles with his prisoner when the sound of drumming hoofs came down the wind. He glanced over his shoulder and, on a hilltop half a mile behind, saw six hors.e.m.e.n coming after him at a dead run. If he had any doubt of the nature of that party he lost it when he turned his head in time to catch Gonzales waving a handkerchief to them.

The elements of the situation were simple enough,--the Texan's jaded mount, the fresh horses of the pursuers, the desperation of the prisoner for whom the gallows was waiting in Los Angeles,--but most men would have wasted some time in determining on a solution. Love, who had learned in a hard school the value of seconds in such races as this, did not choose to part with any more of his handicap than he had to. So he whipped out his pistol, shot Gonzales through the heart, and spurred his horse down the dusty road with enough start to distance the bandits into town.

That was the first noteworthy casualty the band had suffered. It was followed by the capture of young Reyes Feliz, Rosita's brother, who was hanged in Los Angeles; and shortly afterward Murieta led his whole company northward into the oak-dotted hills back of San Luis Obispo where they lost twenty men--among them Claudio the expert spy--in a day-long battle with a posse of ranchers whom they had sought to ambush.

Then Joaquin Murieta rode back with the survivors to Arroyo Cantoova; and if Rosita, who had been sent with the other women to the rendezvous early in the summer, felt her heart leap when she saw her lover coming, she soon felt it sink again, for he spent but few moments in her company. Horses and gold and his large plan to sweep like fire through California--these were the only thoughts he had.

Within a week he had divided the band into several parties, two of which under himself and Three-Fingered Jack went north to plunder the placer camps.

There is hardly an old town in the whole Bret Harte country that has not its stories of the raiding during the winter of 1852-53. With the knowledge which he and his lieutenants had gained at Mokelumne Hill the chief directed operations, but as the weeks went by the influence of Three-Fingered Jack grew until his methods were employed in every robbery. By December the list of wanton murders had grown so great that the State of California offered a reward of five thousand dollars for Joaquin Murieta, alive or dead.

The notices announcing this reward were posted in Stockton one Sunday.

The town was then the point of departure for the southern placer district, a lively place with craft of all kinds coming from San Francisco to tie up at its levee and an endless procession of wagons traveling out cross the flat lands of the San Joaquin valley to the foot-hills. Everything was running wide open and the sidewalks were crowded with men, most of whom were ready to take a rather long chance for five thousand dollars.

One of the bills, tacked to the flag-pole in the public square, attracted more readers than the others, and many a group gathered about it to discuss what show a bold man might have of earning the reward. The sidewalk loungers watched these debaters come and go until the thing was beginning to be an old story; and they were almost ready to turn their jaded attention elsewhere when a well-dressed Mexican came riding down the street, turned his fine horse into the square, and reined up before the flag-pole. The audience watched him leap from the saddle and write something at the bottom of the bill.

When he had touched his horse with the spurs and ridden away at a slow Spanish trot, one of the onlookers, more curious--or perhaps he was less lazy--than his fellows, sauntered over to read what had been written; and when he read it waved his hand in so wild a gesture that every one who saw him came running to the flag-pole. At the bottom of the placard with its offer of five thousand dollars' reward for Joaquin Murieta, alive or dead, they found this subscription set down in a good bold hand:

"And I will pay ten thousand dollars more. JOAQUIN MURIETA."

Faith in the State's promise rather than that of the robber sent many riders out of Stockton that day to scour the willow thickets by the river and the winding tulle sloughs. The posses were speeding back and forth all 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 pa.s.sengers, 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 s.h.i.+p'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 hors.e.m.e.n 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 pa.s.sage of the bill authorizing such a body under his leaders.h.i.+p.

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 companions.h.i.+p he shared.

What talks those two men had together one can only guess from the nature of the deeds that followed. No miner was too small game for the chief now, he slit the throats of Chinamen for their garnerings from worked-over tailings, he tortured teamsters to learn where they kept their wages hidden, and where he pa.s.sed during the night men found corpses in the morning, until those of his own countrymen who had befriended him in other days turned against him and betrayed his hiding-places to the officers, and the whole foot-hill country from the Tuolomme to the Feather River was patrolled by riders hunting him.

In Hornitas he sought out a Mexican who had notified a posse of his presence in the neighborhood, shot him down at broad noonday on the main street, and galloped away with the pistol-bullets of his pursuers raising little spurts of dust about his horse's flying hoofs. A few weeks later he revisited the town; killed a deputy sheriff who sought to capture him; and then hanged another of his countrymen, who had informed the officer of his hiding-place.

One spring day he was riding alone in the foot-hills of Calaveras County when he came on a party of twenty-five miners at the head of a box canon. They were encamped in a sort of amphitheater among the rocks with steep walls on three sides and only one outlet, a narrow Digger trail along the cliff a hundred feet above the brawling stream.

Murieta had ridden up the ravine by that dangerous pathway and now he was sitting with one leg thrown over his saddle-horn, talking to the members of the party. They were on their way out from some winter diggings, they told him, and they had plenty of dust with them. He spoke of Joaquin Murieta and they pointed to their belts; they were heavily armed, every man of them. Why should they fear the bandit? He let his eyes go around the place taking quick appraisal of their numerous pack and saddle animals, their camp equipment, their plump buckskin sacks--rich booty if only he had a party of cutthroats at his heels. But he was alone; the best he could do was to put a good face on the matter and, in his role of honest traveler, learn what he could, to store it up for future reference.

He was doing this and getting on very nicely at it, when one of the party, who had gone down to the stream for water before his arrival, came climbing up among the rocks with two filled buckets. The man looked up at hearing a stranger's voice and Murieta glanced down at the same instant. The eyes of each proclaimed recognition. 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 canon 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 sc.r.a.ped 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 canon-head.

Their bullets rained on the rocks about him as he flourished his knife in a final gesture of defiance and pa.s.sed 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 canon, 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 c.o.c.k brought one of the lounging miners to his feet. He fell forward in the instant of his rising, and the woods gave back a hundred cras.h.i.+ng 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 c.o.c.king 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 ma.s.sacre 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 mission as they bloomed on that July afternoon in 1853, the dusty hors.e.m.e.n 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.s 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 gra.s.sy 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 hors.e.m.e.n, 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 was.h.i.+ng 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 saffron ridges from three sides.

They came at a dead run. Before he could reach his saddle one of the company had pulled up between him and the weapons. Captain Love was leaning from his horse questioning Three-Fingered Jack. Murieta took another step toward his weapons; the ranger stopped him with a gesture; he halted, glanced at Captain Love, and scowled.

"If you have any questions to ask," he cried, "I am leader of this party. Talk to me."