Page:The Valley of Adventure (1926).pdf/199

 vision was the work with which they were most earnestly employed. Soldiers always had been at the various missions, or stationed within easy call, to enforce the discipline of those who directed the labors in the fields. The Indians were not willing toilers in the upbuilding of these vast mud palaces, these high-walled, stolid, frowning, gloomy churches, yet never since the remote days of the beginning at San Diego de Acalá, when they killed two of the pioneer padres, had they lifted their hands against the priests.

There was beginning to be much talk of liberty among the young men, it is true, words put into their mouths by crafty rascals who would have changed the Indians' pastoral security under mission rule to the debauched state of wage slavery which they finally accomplished, to the wreckage and almost extinction of this simple people within a generation. Tonight this talk of liberty was bolder and more outspoken than ever before. The young men gathered in the trampled little streets, talking of working as freemen among the ranchers, gaining money and horses, flocks, herds, homes of their own, instead of bending their labors to the padres' comfort and enrichment with no promise of future change.

Let the old ones, and the timid ones, remain at the mission, they said. Now that Don Geronimo was down, it was time for the young ones to go. Against this urging there were far-seeing ones who revealed the white men's purpose in alienating them