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 crown which time had broadened so that a razor was no longer called for there.

"I heard that Don Geronimo had been putting the scorpion on somebody's back," Captain del Valle said.

"Yes, it was a youth called Cristóbal, a quick-minded lad who is not understood by Geronimo, I fear. The poor fellow, in some sort of wild resentment, got on a horse and tried to run away, to join this fellow Alvitre, Geronimo says, but I think there is only fancy in such a charge. Geronimo grows too severe; I must ask our president to put a restriction on him."

Captain del Valle looked up sharply, as if he had heard a discord in the rendition of a maestro. He was a short and puffy man, grown fat from idleness and much feeding at this mission post and that; a man of middle age, whose brown hair was cut close to his well-shaped head, whose pointed brown beard was penciled with streaks of silver-grey. It was his habit to fill his cheeks with breath in any period of astonishment, expectation, small crisis or small climax of his rather inconsequential life, which gave him the appearance of a squirrel carrying acorns.

He knew that Padre Ignacio referred to the president of the missions when he spoke of having a restriction put on the mayordomo of San Fernando. Captain del Valle was a man who had run counter to ecclesiastical authority in California dur-