“Bloody Fenner?” echoed Billy Ritchie. “Bloody Fenner was the best damn brawler and fighter this side of the Sacramento River. He knew all the Indians by name, the Wappos and the Patwins, and there were plenty who said that he’d been initiated in a Wappo temescal. The stories say that he was a tall man, with a face as fierce as a bear, and that he could shoot a fly off of a horse’s ass if he was blindfolded and standing on his head.”

Neil grinned. “Sounds like that’s one talent that’s gotten bred out of the family.”

“Just as well, if you ask my opinion,” Billy Ritchie rejoined. “Bloody Fenner wasn’t loved by nobody, except for his wife, and by all accounts she was twice as hard-bitten as he was.”

Neil was silent for a moment, watching the old-timer sitting in his invalid chair, stroking and stroking that black, furry cat. Then the guest said softly, “Did you ever hear tell of a battle? A battle that Bloody Fenner might have fought in?”

“Sure. He fought in plenty. He fought for José Sanchez back in the early days, and the story goes that he helped Father Altamira round up Patwins and put them to work for the mission at Sonoma. That was back in the late 1820s, and times were raw then, I can tell you.”

“I’m thinking of one battle in particular,” said Neil. “A battle where the white men came off pretty badly, and the Indians did well.”

“There were a few of those,” said Billy Ritchie, shaking his head. “I heard tell of a massacre of ten white farmers and their families by the Wappos up at St. Helena, and there was an ambush of three white squatters by Wappos in York Creek. Maybe the worst, though, was the time they say Bloody Fenner took a league of land from the Wappo Indians in exchange for leading twenty settlers and their families into a trap set in the forest up at Las Posadas, close to Conn Creek. The settlers had trusted Fenner, you see, and paid him in gold to act as their scout and interpreter, so that they could lay out claims to farmland in Bell Canyon. But he took them slap-bang into a Wappo ambush, and they were all killed. Twenty farmers, and their twenty wives, and fifty-three young children.”

Neil licked his lips. “Did anyone prove that it was Fenner who did it? Or was it just hearsay?”