erienced
a pitying contempt for all those other spots in the world which were so
plainly less favored. What do you wish, senor? Fine warm days? You
have them here. Nice cool nights for sound slumber? Right here in San
Juan, _amigo mio_. A desert across which the eye may run without
stopping until it be tired, a wonderful desert whereon at dawn and dusk
God weaves all of the alluring soft mists of mystery? Shaded canons at
noonday with water and birds and flowers? Behold the mountains.
Everything desirable, in short. That there might be men who desired
the splash of waves, the sheen of wet beaches, the boom of surf, did
not suggest itself to one who had never seen the ocean. So, then, San
Juan was "what you will." A man may fix his eye upon the little
Mission cross which is always pointing to heaven and God; or he may
pass through the shaded doors of the Casa Blanca, which, men say, give
pathway into hell the shortest way.

Ignacio, having meditatively enjoyed his whiskey and listened smilingly
to the tinkle of a mandolin in the _patio_ under a grape-vine arbor,
had rolled his cigarette and turned his back square upon the
devil . . . of whom he had no longer anything to ask. As he went out
he stopped in the doorway long enough to rub his back against a corner
of the wall and to strike a match. Then, almost inaudibly humming the
mandolin air, he slouched out into the burning street.

For twenty years he had striven with the weeds in the Mission garden,
and no man during that time dared say which had had the best of it,
Ignacio Chavez or the interloping alfileria and purslane. In the
matters of a vast leisureliness and tumbling along the easiest way they
resembled each other, these two avowed enemies. For twenty years he
had looked upon the bells as his own, had filled his eye with them day
after day, had thought the first thing in the morning to see that they
were there, regarding them as solicitously in the rare rainy weather as
his old mother regarded her few mongrel chicks. Twenty full years, and
yet Ignacio Chavez was not more than thirty years old, or thirty-five,
perhaps. He did not know, no one cared.

He was on his way to attack with his bare brown hands some of the weeds
which were spilling over into the walk which led through the garden and
to the priest's house. As a matter of fact he had awakened with this
purpose in mind, had gone his lazy way all day fully purposing to give
it his attent