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Each of these men spoke of the look as having been directed at himself. Had they been members of one of the dark-skinned races, to whom the vendetta is peculiarly an institution, they would have understood the purport of that look. But none of them understood and the monte-dealer was left to keep his promise to his dead brother.
And so it has come down to us to-day. In the days of '49 when Murphy's Diggings was as lively a little placer camp as one could find in a long ride through the red foot-hills of the Sierras, a young Mexican monte-dealer disappeared.
But the proprietor might as well have saved himself the trouble of that search; the monte-dealer had forsaken his table for a different sort of job. Just at this time he was on the hill beyond the upper end of the camp kneeling beside an open grave; and in his clasped hands, uplifted high above his head, he held a naked bowie-knife.
They listened to his explanations and went with him to his brother who told them how he had bought the animal in good faith from a stranger. Whereat they seized the narrator, bound him, and hanged him to the nearest live-oak tree; then stripped the monte-dealer to the waist, tied him to the same tree, and flogged him until the blood ran down his bare back.
In April almost two years to a day after the monte-dealer had left his job at Murphy's Diggings six Mexicans came riding into the town of Mokelumne Hill, which lies on a bench-land above the river.
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