A free black man named Jack Holten (played by Philip Michael Thomas) is eating lunch at Victoria's tavern. When two of the alcalde's guards start harassing him because of his race, Jack punches one of them. He is then imprisoned in the town jail for assaulting a soldier of Spain. The alcalde takes Jack's papers that prove he is free and plans to sell him to a U.S. plantation. Don Digeo and Don Alejandro know that the alcalde cannot resist a friendly wager, so they make a bet that if Jack beats the alcalde's best guard in a boxing bout, then he wins his freedom.

The traveling Frenchman Foucard impresses the pueblo, even ever-skeptic Don Diego, as magician and pickpocket, then romances Victoria and performs various science-based services to various villagers. Sergeant Mendoza must command the protection of a gold shipment, but as earlier near San Francisco, it is robbed by someone who uses a fireball. Even Zorro was too late and finds Foucard asleep, from a distance. Diego shows Felipe the chemical properties of pyrosulphate solve two of Foucard's mysteries: how the magician 'revived' an apparently dead dove