The Doomswoman: An Historical Romance of Old California

Estenega drew rein the next night before the neglected Mission of San Rafael.  The valley, surrounded by hills dark with the silent redwoods, bore not a trace of the populous life of the days before secularization.  The padre lived alone, lodge-keeper of a valley of shadows.

He opened the door of his room on the corridor as he heard the approach of the traveler, squinting his bleared, yellow-spotted eyes.  He was surly by nature, but he bowed low to the man whose power was so great in California, and whose generosity had sent him many a bullock.  He cooked him supper from his frugal store, piled the logs in the open fireplace,—­November was come,—­and, after a bottle of wine, produced from Estenega’s saddle-bag, expanded into a hermit’s imitation of conviviality.  Late in the night they still sat on either side of the table in the dusty, desolate room.  The Forgotten had been entertained with vivid and shifting pictures of the great capital in which he had passed his boyhood.  He smiled occasionally; now and again he gave a quick impatient sigh.  Suddenly Estenega leaned forward and fixed him with his powerful gaze.

“Is there gold in these mountains?” he asked, abruptly.

The priest was thrown off his guard for a moment; a look of meaning flashed into his eyes, then one of cunning displaced it.

“It may be, Señor Don Diego; gold is often in the earth.  But had I the unholy knowledge, I would lock it in my breast.  Gold is the canker in the heart of the world.  It is not for the Church to scatter the evil broadcast.”

Estenega shut his teeth.  Fanaticism was a more powerful combatant than avarice.

“True, my father.  But think of the good that gold has wrought.  Could 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.”

The priest looked into the eyes of steel and contemptuously determined face before him, and shut his lips.  He was alone with a desperate man; he had not even a servant; he could be murdered, and his murderer go unsuspected; but the heart of the fanatic was in him.  He made no reply.

“You know me,” said Estenega.  “I owe half my power in California to the fact that I do not make a threat to-day and forget it to-morrow.  You will show me where that gold is, or I shall kill you.”

“The servant of God dies when his hour comes.  If I am to die by the hand of the assassin, so be it.”

Estenega leaned forward and placed his strong hand about the priest’s baggy throat, pushing the table against his chest.  He pressed his thumb against the throttle, his second finger hard against the jugular, and the tongue rolled over the teeth, the congested eyes bulged.  “It may be that you scorn death, but may not fancy the mode of it.  I have no desire to kill you.  Alive or dead, your life is of no more value than that of a worm.  But you shall die, and die with much discomfort, unless you do as I wish.”  His hand relaxed its grasp, but still pressed the rough dirty throat.

“Accursed heretic!” said the priest.

“Spare your curses for the superstitious.”

He saw a gleam of cunning come into the priest’s eyes.  “Very well; if I must I must.  Let me rise, and I will conduct you.”

Estenega took a piece of rope from his saddle-bag and tied it about the priest’s waist and his own.  “If you have any holy pitfall in view for me, I shall have the pleasure of your company.  And if I am led into labyrinths to die of starvation, you at least will have a meal:  I could not eat you.”

If the priest was disconcerted, he did not show it.  He took a lantern from a shelf, lit the fragment of candle, and, opening a door at the back, walked through the long line of inner rooms.  All were heaped with rubbish.  In one he found a trap-door with his foot, and descended rough steps cut out of the earth.  The air rose chill and damp, and Estenega knew that the tunnel of the Mission was below, the secret exit to the hills which the early Fathers built as a last resource in case of defeat by savage tribes.  When they reached the bottom of the steps the tallow dip illuminated but a narrow circle; Estenega could form no idea of the workmanship of the tunnel, except that it was not more than six feet and a few inches high, for his hat brushed the top, and that the floor and sides appeared to be of pressed clay.  There was ventilation somewhere, but no light.  They walked a mile or more, and then Estenega had a sense of stepping into a wider and higher excavation.

“We are no longer in the tunnel,” said the priest.  He lifted the lantern and swung it above his head.  Estenega saw that they were in a circular room, hollowed probably out of the heart of a hill.  He also saw something else.

“What is that?” he exclaimed, sharply.

The priest handed him the lantern.  “Look for yourself,” he said.

Estenega took the lantern, and, holding it just above his head and close to the walls, slowly traversed the room.  It was belted with three strata of crystal-like quartz, sown thick with glittering yellow specks and chunks.  Each stratum was about three feet wide.

“There is a fortune here,” he said.  He felt none of the greed of gold, merely a recognition of its power.

“Yes, señor; enough to pay the debt of a nation.”

“Where are we?  Under what hill?  I am sorry I had not a compass with me.  It was impossible to make any accurate guess of direction in that slanting tunnel.  Where is the outlet?”

The priest made no reply.

Estenega turned to him peremptorily.  “Answer me.  How can I find this place from without?”

“You never will find it from without.  When the danger from Indians was over, a pious Father closed the opening.  This gold is not for you.  You could not find even the trap-door by yourself.”

“Then why have you brought me here?”

“To tantalize you.  To punish you for your insult to the Church through me.  Kill me now, if you wish.  Better death than hell.”

Estenega made a rapid circuit of the room.  There was no mode of egress other than that by which they had entered, and no sign of any previously existing.  He sprang upon the priest and shook him until the worn stumps rattled in their gums.  “You dog!” he said, “to balk me with your ignorant superstition!  Take me out of this place by its other entrance at once, that I may remain on the hill until morning.  I would not trust your word.  You shall tell me, if I have to torture you.”

The priest made a sudden spring and closed with Estenega, hugging him like a bear.  The lantern fell and went out.  The two men stumbled blindly in the blackness, striking the walls, wrestling desperately, the priest using his teeth and panting like a beast.  But he was no match for the virility and science of his young opponent.  Estenega threw him in a moment and bound him with the rope.  Then he found the lantern and lit the candle again.  He returned to the priest and stood over him.  The latter was conquered physically, but the dogged light of bigotry still burned in his eyes, although Estenega’s were not agreeable to face.

Estenega was furious.  He had twisted Santa Ana, one of the most subtle and self-seeking men of his time, around his finger as if he had been a yard of ribbon; Alvarado, the wisest man ever born in the Californias, was swayed by his judgment; yet all the arts of which his intellect was master fell blunt and useless before this clay-brained priest.  He had more respect for the dogs in his kennels, but unless he resorted to extreme measures the creature would defeat him through sheer brute ignorance.  Estenega was not a man to stop in sight of victory or to give his sword to an enemy he despised.

“You are at my mercy.  You realize that now, I suppose.  Will you show me the other way out?”

The priest drew down his under-lip like a snarling dog, revealing the discolored stumps.  But he made no other reply.

Estenega lit a match, and, kneeling beside the priest, held it to his stubbled beard.  As the flame licked the flesh the man uttered a yell like a kicked brute.  Estenega sprang to his feet with an oath.  “I can’t do it!” he exclaimed, with bitter disgust.  “I haven’t the iron of cruelty in me.  I am not fit to be a ruler of men.”  He untied the rope about the prisoner’s feet.  “Get up,” he said, “and conduct me back as we came.”  The priest scrambled to his feet and hobbled down the long tunnel.  They ascended the steps beneath the Mission and emerged into the room.  Estenega turned swiftly to prevent the closing of the trap-door, but only in time to hear it shut with a spring and the priest kick rubbish above it.

He cut the rope which bound the other’s hands.  “Go,” he said, “I have no further use for you.  And if you report this, I need not explain to you that it will fare worse with you than it will with me.”

The priest fled, and Estenega, hanging the lantern on a nail, pushed aside the rubbish with his feet, purposing to pace the room until dawn.  In a few moments, however, he discovered that the despised hermit was not without his allies; ten thousand fleas, the pest of the country, assaulted every portion of his body they could reach.  They swarmed down the legs of his riding-boots, up his trousers, up his sleeves, down his neck.  “There is no such thing in life as tragedy,” he thought.  He hung the lantern outside the door to mark the room, and paced the yard until morning.  But there were dark hours yet before the dawn, and during one of them a figure, when his back was turned, crept to the lantern and hung it before an adjoining room.  When light came,—­and the fog came first,—­all Estenega’s efforts to find the trap-door were unavailing, although the yard was littered with the rubbish he flung into it from the room.  He suspected the trick, but there were ten rooms exactly alike, and although he cleared most of them he could discover no trace of the trap-door.  He looked at the hills surrounding the Mission.  They were many, and beyond there were others.  He mounted his horse and rode around the buildings, listening carefully for hollow reverberation.  The tunnel was too far below; he heard nothing.

He was defeated.  For the first time in his life he was without resource, overwhelmed by a force stronger than his own will; and his spirit was savage within him.  He had no authority to dig the floors of the Mission, for the Mission and several acres about it were the property of the Church.  The priest never would take him on that underground journey again, for he had learned the weak spot in his armor, nor had he fear of death.  Unless accident favored him, or some one more fortunate, the golden heart of the San Rafael hill would pulse unrifled forever.