buildings bursts into flame, Ignacio Chavez warns the town with a
strident clamor, tugging frantically; be it wedding or discovery of
gold or returns from the county elections, the bell-ringer cunningly
makes the bells talk.

Out on the desert a man might stop and listen, forming his surmise as
the sounds surged to meet him through the heat and silence. He might
smile, if he knew San Juan, as he caught the jubilant message tapped
swiftly out of the bronze bell which had come, men said, with Coronado;
he might sigh at the lugubrious, slow-swelling voice of the big bell
which had come hitherward long ago with the retinue of Marco de Niza,
wondering what old friend or enemy, perchance, had at last closed his
ears to all of Ignacio Chavez's music. Or, 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 Calderón, 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