Estenega drew rein the next night before the neglected Mission of San
Rafael. The valley, surrounded by hills dark with the silent
redwoods, bore not a trace 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, Señor 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 vice in the older
civilizations there was also a higher state of mental development, and
that Religion held her own. He might as well have addressed the walls
of the Mission. He tempted with the bait of one of the more central
Missions. The priest had only the dust of ambition in the cellar of
his brain.
He lost his patience at last. "I must have gold," he said, shortly;
"and you shall show me where to find it. You once betrayed to my
father that you knew of its existence in these hills; and you shall
give me the key."
The priest looked into the eyes of steel and contemptuously determined
face before him, and shut his lips. He was alone with a desperate man;
he had not even a servant; he could be murdered, and his murderer
go unsuspected; but the heart of the fanatic was in him. He made no
reply.
"You know me," said Estenega. "I owe half my power in California to
the fact that I do not make a threat to-day and forget it to-morrow.
You will show me where that gold is, or I shall kill you."
"The servant of God dies when his hour comes. If I am to die by the
hand of the assassin, so be it."
Estenega leaned forward and placed his strong hand about the priest's
baggy throat, pushing the table against his chest. He pressed his
thumb against the throttle, his second finger hard against the
jugular, and the tongue rolled over the teeth, the congested eyes
bulged. "It may be that you scorn death, but may not fancy the mode
of it. I have no desire to kill you. Alive or dead, your life is of no
more value than that of a worm. But you shall die, and die with much
discomfort, unless you do as I wish." His hand relaxed its grasp, but
still pressed the rough dirty throat.
"Accursed heretic!" said the priest.
"Spare your curses for the superstitious."
He saw a gleam of cunning come into the priest's eyes. "Very well; if
I must I must. Let me rise, and I will conduct you."
Estenega took a piece of rope from his saddle-bag and tied it about
the priest's waist and his own. "If you have any holy pitfall in view
for me, I shall have the pleasure of your company. And if I am led
into labyrinths to die of starvation, you at least will have a meal: I
could not eat you."
If the priest was disconcerted, he did not show it. He took a lantern
from a shelf, lit the fragment of candle, and, opening a door at the
back, walked through the long line of inner rooms. All were heaped
with rubbish. In one he found a trap-door with his foot, and descended
rough steps cut out of the earth. The air rose chill and damp, and
Estenega knew that the tunnel of the Mission was below, the secret
exit to the hills which the early Fathers built as a last resource in
case of defeat by savage tribes. When they reached the bottom of the
steps the tallow dip illuminated but a narrow circle; Estenega could
form no idea of the workmanship of the tunnel, except that it was not
more than six feet and a few inches high, for his hat brushed the top,
and that the floor and sides appeared to be of pressed clay. There was
ventilation somewhere, but no light. They walked a mile or more,
and then Estenega had a sense of stepping into a wider and higher
excavation.
"We are no longer in the tunnel," said the priest. He lifted the
lantern and swung it above his head. Estenega saw that they were in a
circular room, hollowed probably out of the heart of a hill. He also
saw something else.
"What is that?" he exclaimed, sharply.
The priest handed him the lantern. "Look for yourself," he said.
Estenega took the lantern, and, holding it just above his head and
close to the walls, slowly traversed the room. It was belted with
three strata of crystal-like quartz, sown thick with glittering yellow
specks and chunks. Each stratum was about three feet wide.
"There is a fortune here," he said. He felt none of the greed of gold,
merely a recognition of its power.
"Yes, señor; enough to pay the debt of a nation."
"Where are we? Under what hill? I am sorry I had not a compass with
me. It was impossible to make any accurate guess of direction in that
slanting tunnel. Where is the outlet?"
The priest made no reply.
Estenega turned to him peremptorily. "Answer me. How can I find this
place from without?"
"You never will find it from without. When the danger from Indians was
over, a pious Father closed the opening. This gold is not for you. You
could not find even the trap-door by yourself."
"Then why have you brought me here?"
"To tantalize you. To punish you for your insult to the Church through
me. Kill me now, if you wish. Better death than hell."
Estenega made a rapid circuit of the room. There was no mode of
egress other than that by which they had entered, and no sign of any
previously existing. He sprang upon the priest and shook him until
the worn stumps rattled in their gums. "You dog!" he said, "to balk
me with your ignorant superstition! Take me out of this place by its
other entrance at once, that I may remain on the hill until morning.
I would not trust your word. You shall tell me, if I have to torture
you."
The priest made a sudden spring and closed with Estenega, hugging
him like a bear. The lantern fell and went out. The two men stumbled
blindly in the blackness, striking the walls, wrestling desperately,
the priest using his teeth and panting like a beast. But he was no
match for the virility and science of his young opponent. Estenega
threw him in a moment and bound him with the rope. Then he found the
lantern and lit the candle again. He returned to the priest and stood
over him. The latter was conquered physically, but the dogged light
of bigotry still burned in his eyes, although Estenega's were not
agreeable to face.
Estenega was furious. He had twisted Santa Ana, one of the most subtle
and self-seeking men of his time, around his finger as if he had
been a yard of ribbon; Alvarado, the wisest man ever born in the
Californias, was swayed by his judgment; yet all the arts of which his
intellect was master fell blunt and useless before this clay-brained
priest. He had more respect for the dogs in his kennels, but unless
he resorted to extreme measures the creature would defeat him through
sheer brute ignorance. Estenega was not a man to stop in sight of
victory or to give his sword to an enemy he despised.
"You are at my mercy. You realize that now, I suppose. Will you show
me the other way out?"
The priest drew down his under-lip like a snarling dog, revealing the
discolored stumps. But he made no other reply.
Estenega lit a match, and, kneeling beside the priest, held it to his
stubbled beard. As the flame licked the flesh the man uttered a yell
like a kicked brute. Estenega sprang to his feet with an oath. "I
can't do it!" he exclaimed, with bitter disgust. "I haven't the iron
of cruelty in me. I am not fit to be a ruler of men." He untied the
rope about the prisoner's feet. "Get up," he said, "and conduct me
back as we came." The priest scrambled to his feet and hobbled down
the long tunnel. They ascended the steps beneath the Mission and
emerged into the room. Estenega turned swiftly to prevent the closing
of the trap-door, but only in time to hear it shut with a spring and
the priest kick rubbish above it.
He cut the rope which bound the other's hands. "Go," he said, "I have
no further use for you. And if you report this, I need not explain to
you that it will fare worse with you than it will with me."
The priest fled, and Estenega, hanging the lantern on a nail, pushed
aside the rubbish with his feet, purposing to pace the room until
dawn. In a few moments, however, he discovered that the despised
hermit was not without his allies; ten thousand fleas, the pest of the
country, assaulted every portion of his body they could reach. They
swarmed down the legs of his riding-boots, up his trousers, up his
sleeves, down his neck. "There is no such thing in life as tragedy,"
he thought. He hung the lantern outside the door to mark the room, and
paced the yard until morning. But there were dark hours yet before the
dawn, and during one of them a figure, when his back was turned,
crept to the lantern and hung it before an adjoining room. When light
came,--and the fog came first,--all Estenega's efforts to find the
trap-door were unavailing, although the yard was littered with the
rubbish he flung into it from the room. He suspected the trick, but
there were ten rooms exactly alike, and although he cleared most of
them he could discover no trace of the trap-door. He looked at the
hills surrounding the Mission. They were many, and beyond there were
others. He mounted his horse and rode around the buildings, listening
carefully for hollow reverberation. The tunnel was too far below; he
heard nothing.
He was defeated. For the first time in his life he was without
resource, overwhelmed by a force stronger than his own will; and his
spirit was savage within him. He had no authority to dig the floors
of the Mission, for the Mission and several acres about it were
the property of the Church. The priest never would take him on that
underground journey again, for he had learned the weak spot in his
armor, nor had he fear of death. Unless accident favored him, or some
one more fortunate, the golden heart of the San Rafael hill would
pulse unrifled forever.