beads and make chocolate? Was I happy at the Mission? Not for one moon,
senor. I felt as if I had a wild beast chained in me that choked and
panted for the free life of my youth, of my fathers. I ran away from the
Mission twenty-three times--and was brought back and flogged. Many times
I would have crushed my head with a stone had it not been that all the
other Indians of the Mission ran to me like dogs, and that I could make
them tremble with a word and obey with a look. I knew that the Great
Spirit had given me what these poor creatures had not, and that one day
I would give California to them again. It has begun."

"But we have better things to eat and drink and more comfortable houses
and clothes than you have in your pueblos. I like what the priests call
'civilisation.'"

"It is for the white man, not for the Indian with a skin like the earth
and a heart like the wild-cat. If we did not know of fine bread and thin
wine and heavy shoes and cursed bags about our legs we should not want
them. Padre Flores says that he and the other priests came here to make
us happy. Why not let us be happy in our own way? We needed no
teaching."

Years after, Roldan, who grew to know the world well and many men,
recalled the conversation of that night, and meditated upon the strange
workings of the human mind: the fundamental philosophy of life differs
little in the brain of the savage and the brain of the student-thinker.

"We are told that we must progress, grow better," he said.

"Hundreds and hundreds of years Indians lived and died here before the
priests came. All legends say they were happy. Now they 'progress,' and