Page:The Valley of Adventure (1926).pdf/24

 said to the viceroy, which your so-good friend peeped into and read, my brave soldier? Come now; give it to us."

Sergeant Olivera looked at Magdalena and smiled. He offered cigarettes to the complaining man, who spurned them with repellent hand.

"Cigarettes?" said Borromeo. "No, I don't favor the little things. There's only a mouthful of smoke in one of them for a man, and they burn his beard besides. If you've got a long cigar about you, let me have it. Very well; my pipe is better, anyhow. And the governor wrote to the viceroy on a matter, heh?"

"In effect, it was this: Padres with Indian neophytes gathered around their missions are all very well, but padres and Indians never will develop the glorious possibilities of Alta California. It will take," said the wise governor in his letter to the viceroy, "at least a hundred years to bring the Indians up to a state of even crude civilization."

"Four hundred!" Borromeo declared. "There is not one man in five hundred of them with sense enough inside his head to learn how to make a shoe for a mule."

"I think the governor was nearer the truth, for I have seen many Indians of the second and third generation under the padres who are skilled in the crafts of hand."

"It is the young ones," the blacksmith agreed, nodding his head slowly; "the old ones can mix