of the populous life of the days before
secularization. The padre lived alone, lodge-keeper of a valley of
shadows.

He opened the door of his room on the corridor as he heard the
approach of the traveler, squinting his bleared, yellow-spotted eyes.
He was surly by nature, but he bowed low to the man whose power was so
great in California, and whose generosity had sent him many a bullock.
He cooked him supper from his frugal store, piled the logs in the open
fireplace,--November was come,--and, after a bottle of wine, produced
from Estenega's saddle-bag, expanded into a hermit's imitation of
conviviality. Late in the night they still sat on either side of the
table in the dusty, desolate room. The Forgotten had been entertained
with vivid and shifting pictures of the great capital in which he had
passed his boyhood. He smiled occasionally; now and again he gave a
quick impatient sigh. Suddenly Estenega leaned forward and fixed him
with his powerful gaze.

"Is there gold in these mountains?" he asked, abruptly.

The priest was thrown off his guard for a moment; a look of meaning
flashed into his eyes, then one of cunning displaced it.

"It may be, Senor Don Diego; gold is often in the earth. But had I the
unholy knowledge, I would lock it in my breast. Gold is the canker in
the heart of the world. It is not for the Church to scatter the evil
broadcast."

Estenega shut his teeth. Fanaticism was a more powerful combatant than
avarice.

"True, my father. But think of the good that gold has wrought. Could
these Missions have been built without gold?--these thousands of
Indians Christianized?"

"What you say is not untrue; but for one good, ten thousand evils
are wrought with the metal which the devil mixed in hell and poured
through the veins of the earth."

Estenega spent a half-hour representing in concrete and forcible
images the debt which civilization owed to the fact and circulation
of gold. The priest replied that California was a proof that commerce
could exist by barter; the money in the country was not worth speaking
of.

"And no progress to speak of in a hundred years," retorted Estenega.
Then he expatiated upon the unique future of California did she have
gold to develop her wonderful resources. The priest said that to cut
California from her Arcadian simplicity would be to start her on her
journey to the devil along with the corrupt nations of the Old
World. Estenega demonstrated that if there was v