at a sudden fury of
clanging, the man far out on the desert might hurry on, goading his
burro impatiently, to know what great event had occurred in the old
adobe town of San Juan.

It is three hundred and fifty years and more since the six bells of San
Juan came into the new world to toll across that land of quiet mystery
which is the southwest. It is a hundred years since an
all-but-forgotten priest, Francisco Calderon, found them in various
devastated mission churches, assembled them, and set them chiming in
the old garden. There, among the pear-trees and olives and yellow
roses, they still cast their shadows in sun and moonlight, in silence,
and in echoing chimes.

CHAPTER I

THE BELLS RING

Ignacio Chavez, Mexican that he styled himself, Indian that the
community deemed him, or "breed" of badly mixed blood that he probably
was, made his loitering way along the street toward the Mission. A
thin, yellowish-brown _cigarita_ dangling from his lips, his wide,
dilapidated conical hat tilted to the left side of his head in a
listless sort of concession to the westering sun, he was, as was
customary with him, utterly at peace. Ten minutes ago he had had
twenty cents; two minutes after the acquisition of his elusive wealth
he had exchanged the two dimes for whiskey at the Casa Blanca; the
remaining eight minutes of the ten he required to make his way, as he
naively put it, "between hell and heaven."

For from a corner of the peaceful old Mission garden at one end of the
long street one might catch a glimpse of the Casa Blanca at the other
end sprawling in the sun; between the two sturdy walled buildings had
the town strung itself as it grew. As old a relic as the church itself
was La Casa Blanca, and since San Juan could remember, in all matters
antipodal to the religious calm of the padres' monument. Deep-shaded
doorways let into the three-feet-thick earthen walls, waxed floors,
green tables, and bar and cool looking-glasses . . . a place which
invited, lured, held, and frequently enough finally damned.

San Juan, in the languid philosophy of Ignacio Chavez, was what you
will. It epitomized the universe. You had everything here which the
soul of man might covet. Never having dwelt elsewhere since his mother
bore him here upon the rim of the desert and with the San Juan
mountains so near that, Ignacio Chavez pridefully knew, a man standing
upon the Mesa Alta might hear the ringing of his bells, he exp