These men had camped at an uninhabited cabin called the "Frenchman's," where they had built a fire and were making themselves both merry and comfortable. They informed the expressman that they had left their friend (?) three miles back, in a dying state; that the cold had been too much for him, and that no doubt he was already dead. They had brought away the money, and even the blankets, of the expiring wretch! They said that if they had stopped with him they would have been frozen themselves. But even if their story is true, they must be the most brutal of creatures not to have made him as comfortable as possible, with all the blankets, and, after they had built their fire and got warm, to have returned and ascertained if he were really dead.
On hearing the expressman's report, several men who had been acquainted with the deceased started out to try and discover his remains. They found his violin, broken into several pieces, but all traces of the poor fellow himself had disappeared, probably forever.
In the mean while some travelers had carried the same news to Burke's Rancho, when several of the residents of that place followed the two men, and overtook them, to Bidwell's Bar, where they had them arrested on suspicion of murder. They protested their innocence, of course, and one of them said that he would lead a party to the spot where they had left the dying man. On arriving in the vicinity of the place, he at first stated that it was under one tree, then another, and another, and at last ended by declaring that it was utterly impossible for him to remember where they were camped at the time of R.'s death.
In this state of things, nothing was to be done but to return to B.'s, when, the excitement having somewhat subsided, they were allowed to proceed on their journey, the money, which they both swore R. had willed in his dying moments to a near relation of one of these very men, having been taken from them, in order to be sent by express to the friends of the deceased in the States.
Although they have been acquitted, many shake their heads doubtfully at the whole transaction. It seems very improbable that a man, accustomed all his life to hard labor and exposure, even although slightly unwell, as it is said he was, at the time, should have sunk under the cold during a walk of less than twenty miles, amid a gentle fall of snow and rain, when, as it is well known, the air is comparatively mild. It is to be hoped, however, that the companions of R. were brutal rather than criminal, though the desertion of a dying friend under such circumstances, even to the last unfeeling and selfish act of removing from the expiring creature his blankets, is, in truth, almost as bad as actual murder.
I hope, in my next, that I shall have something more cheerful than the above chapter of horrors to relate. In the mean while, adios, and think as kindly as you can of the dear California, even though her lustrous skies gaze upon such barbarous deeds.
