in the tower of the mission chapel of San Buena-ventura. The sun which
had beamed that day and indeed every day for the whole dry season over
the red-tiled roofs of that old and happily ventured pueblo seemed to
broaden to a smile as it dipped below the horizon, as if in undiminished
enjoyment of its old practical joke of suddenly plunging the Southern
California coast in darkness without any preliminary twilight. The olive
and fig trees at once lost their characteristic outlines in formless
masses of shadow; only the twisted trunks of the old pear trees in the
mission garden retained their grotesque shapes and became gruesome in
the gathering gloom. The encircling pines beyond closed up their serried
files; a cool breeze swept down from the coast range and, passing
through them, sent their day-long heated spices through the town.

If there was any truth in the local belief that the pious incantation of
the Angelus bell had the power of excluding all evil influence abroad
at that perilous hour within its audible radius, and comfortably keeping
all unbelieving wickedness at a distance, it was presumably ineffective
as regarded the innovating stage-coach from Monterey that twice a
week at that hour brought its question-asking, revolver-persuading and
fortune-seeking load of passengers through the sleepy Spanish town. On
the night of the 3d of August, 1856, it had not only brought but set
down at the Posada one of those passengers. It was a Mr. Ezekiel
Corwin, formerly known to these pages as "hired man" to the late Squire
Blandford, of North Liberty, Connecticut, but now a shrewd, practical,
self-sufficient, and self-asserting unit of the more cautious later
Californian immigration. As the stage rattled away again with more or
less humorous and open disparagement of the town and the Posada from its
"outsiders," he lounged with lazy but systematic deliberation towards
Mateo Morez, the proprietor.