Near Rio Vista

Many a strange and wonderful thing happens in California. When the Sacramento River near Rio Vista--40 mi. northeast of Oakland--receded fortnight ago, the headless body of a young Hindu was found sitting bolt upright, chained to a tractor wheel. He was identified as Sant Ram Pande, 32, engineering student at the University of California. The method of his identification was remarkable. Only three weeks prior he had insisted that his fingerprints be recorded by the State Bureau of Criminal Identification. He had then set out to find the slayers of 13 Hindus who have been murdered in and about San Francisco within the past five years.

Suspecting a religious feud between Sikhs (dissenters from Brahmanic Hinduism) and Hindus (Sant Ram Pande was of the Brahman caste), police combed East Indian colonies up and down the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys. The day following the discovery of the body, three Sikhs were found hiding in a barn near Fairfield, 15 mi. from the scene of the crime. Also in the barn officers discovered a harrow with a wheel similar to that found with Pande's body. At Pande's cremation two Sikhs quarrelled, one was stabbed.

Old Californians were not sanguine about the possibility of solving Sant Ram Pande's murder or the murders of his 13 countrymen, for the State's Indian population is even more secretive than its Chinese and Japanese.

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