would strike the sleeper's face, calling him to the endless duties of the day. Near it was a small altar, and a chair with rawhide seat. A similar chair stood beside the table with the books and inkstand. The room, spacious enough to contain a king's furnishings, held nothing more. There was not even a peg holding Padre Ignacio's extra gown. It was a question, indeed, if he commanded so much luxury.
The sound of the music and happy voices mounted in through the open window and broke upon Padre Ignacio's meditations. At first he heard with nothing more than a subconscious realization, as one is aware of the insect chorus of a summer night. Then it welled until it became insistent, clamorous on the ear for attention. Padre Ignacio paused in his tramping to lean at the window and listen.
"This is strange!" he muttered, hearing laughter rise unrestrained as the music ceased. "They are dancing, when it is neither a fiesta nor the eve of a fiesta, without permission asked or given."
Padre Ignacio was deeply troubled and disturbed by this loud evidence of independent thought and action in his neophytes. It was the first time in his mission experience of thirty years and more that such a demonstration had occurred. It was the young ones, he reflected with sorrow, the grandsons of the savages who had come at the first tolling of the bells to subject themselves to the padres' God. Reverence was dying out of them, he feared;
