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."