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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 passage of the bill authorizing such a body under his leadership.
Now the manly settlers of the San Joaquin rise in wrath. Texan rangers, old veterans, heroes of Comanche and Sioux battles, all swear to hunt Joaquin Murieta to death. Maxime Valois takes the saddle. He posts strong forces in the defiles opening to the coast. A secret messenger leaves for Monterey. A vigorous attack on the coast bandits drives them toward the inland passes.
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.
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.
"I'll talk to whom I please," Love answered, and just then William Byrnes came riding into sight. Murieta took one look at the man whom he had known in the days when he walked unfeared among his fellows and let his eyes go around the circle of riders; he saw Three-Fingered Jack watching him narrowly. His hand stole up along the mare's glossy neck.
While the others were fighting their way out of the ambush Sheriff Buchanan emptied his own weapon in a duel with one of the robbers, and collapsed badly wounded in several places. Weeks later, during his recovery, Joaquin Murieta sent the sheriff word that he was the man who had shot him down.
"I am Joaquin Murieta," he announced, "and I brought you here to kill you." Upon which he stabbed Clark to the heart. All this was told the next day in the streets of San José, but where the information came from no one knew. Murieta's custom of sending out such tidings through confederates was not so well understood then as it came to be later.
All authorities agree that Joaquin Murieta managed to kill at least fifteen and possibly two or three more of the score whose faces he had so carefully imprinted on his memory while the lash was biting into his bare back.
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.
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.
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