chested, slow crushing strength of Borromeo, the blacksmith. This man was thin of shoulders and chest compared to Borromeo. His was strength in its refinement, strength that had the keenness of a quick mind to direct it, a leaping, bounding, swift strength that would strike and spring like a cougar away from a retaliating blow.
Strange thoughts for a priest, perhaps; unusual conclusions to register in his active mind upon his weighing of this stranger from a far-off, barbarous land. But it is not unlikely that Padre Mateo was pretty much of a business man, and a man who knew the world and the creatures that move in its ways, as many of the mission fathers were. There were other matters, also, besides spiritual, to occupy the thoughts of the mission padres in those changing days.
Juan Molinero stood looking abroad upon the mission and the mission lands, its enclosure of long, grey adobe walls, raised in prodigious labor by the hands of savage man, directed thus into the arts of peace and prosperity by the patience, the rigor, the force if necessary, of these indomitable men. The site of the dam impounding the waters of the little river was a mile or more northward of the mission buildings, close against the hills; the rise to it was considerable, affording a clear survey to one who stood upon it over-looking the mission property in the Valley of the Oaks. How marvelous, thought Juan Molinero, this work that had been accomplished here.
