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 mission 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.