yours in the cart with him, Juan; I will take charge of it henceforward. I fear it will be many a long day before we quit the old method of threshing our grain at the Mission San Fernando. Forward, Cristóbal; hasten with him to his door."
Cristóbal took up the goad, a gleam of pleasure in his quick eyes, a look of triumph in his dark handsome face. He threw his head back, shaking his long hair from his brow, whistled to the oxen, his goad poised to strike. The mellow, vibrant note of a bell sounded over the fields, three measured strokes. All heads bent, all hands fluttered over breasts, all lips moved in the brief words of a prayer.
"Forward, then," said Padre Ignacio, as the bell began again, quick and joyous in its tolling, the evening signal calling the laborers home from the fields.
In that way Don Geronimo went home with his bleeding face, his feet at the cart's end like the feet of a dead man going to his grave. And so the neophytes followed him, their bare heads lifted in the sense of a new freedom. The sound of the evening bell went rolling over the fields, now dimming as the wind bent it seaward, now welling as there came a lull. There was a purple on the hills like the mist of wine.
