e 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 passed 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 canyon. 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 recognit