The Splendid Idle Forties | Page 8

no longer in his carriage; it looked alert and muscular; recklessness
accentuated the sternness of his face.
As he rode, the fog receded slowly. He left the chaparral and rode by
green marshes cut with sloughs and stained with vivid patches of
orange. The frogs in the tules chanted their hoarse matins. Through
brush-covered plains once more, with sparsely wooded hills in the
distance, and again the tules, the marsh, the patches of orange. He rode
through a field of mustard; the pale yellow petals brushed his dark face,
the delicate green leaves won his eyes from the hot glare of the
ascending sun, the slender stalks, rebounding, smote his horse's flanks.
He climbed hills to avoid the wide marshes, and descended into willow
groves and fields of daisies. Before noon he was in the San Juan
Mountains, thick with sturdy oaks, bending their heads before the
madroño, that belle of the forest, with her robes of scarlet and her
crown of bronze. The yellow lilies clung to her skirts, and the buckeye
flung his flowers at her feet. The last redwoods were there, piercing the
blue air with their thin inflexible arms, gray as a dusty band of friars.
Out by the willows, whereunder crept the sluggish river, then between
the hills curving about the valley of San Juan Bautista.
At no time is California so beautiful as in the month of June. De la
Vega's wild spirit and savage purpose were dormant for the moment as
he rode down the valley toward the mission. The hills were like gold,
like mammoth fawns veiled with violet mist, like rich tan velvet. Afar,
bare blue steeps were pink in their chasms, brown on their spurs. The
dark yellow fields were as if thick with gold-dust; the pale mustard was
a waving yellow sea. Not a tree marred the smooth hills. The earth sent

forth a perfume of its own. Below the plateau from which rose the
white walls of the mission was a wide field of bright green corn rising
against the blue sky.
The padres in their brown hooded robes came out upon the long
corridor of the mission and welcomed the traveller. Their lands had
gone from them, their mission was crumbling, but the spirit of
hospitality lingered there still. They laid meat and fruit and drink on a
table beneath the arches, then sat about him and asked him eagerly for
news of the day. Was it true that the United States of America were at
war with Mexico, or about to be? True that their beloved flag might fall,
and the stars and stripes of an insolent invader rise above the fort of
Monterey?
De la Vega recounted the meagre and conflicting rumours which had
reached California, but, not being a prophet, could not tell them that
they would be the first to see the red-white-and-blue fluttering on the
mountain before them. He refused to rest more than an hour, but
mounted the fresh horse the padres gave him and went his way, riding
hard and relentlessly, like all Californians.
He sped onward, through the long hot day, leaving the hills for the
marshes and a long stretch of ugly country, traversing the beautiful San
Antonio Valley in the night, reaching the Mission of San Miguel at
dawn, resting there for a few hours. That night he slept at a hospitable
ranch-house in the park-like valley of Paso des Robles, a grim silent
figure amongst gay-hearted people who delighted to welcome him. The
early morning found him among the chrome hills; and at the Mission of
San Luis Obispo the good padres gave him breakfast. The little valley,
round as a well, its bare hills red and brown, gray and pink, violet and
black, from fire, sloping steeply from a dizzy height, impressed him
with a sense of being prisoned in an enchanted vale where no message
of the outer world could come, and he hastened on his way.
Absorbed as he was, he felt the beauty he fled past. A line of golden
hills lay against sharp blue peaks. A towering mass of gray rocks had
been cut and lashed by wind and water, earthquake and fire, into the
semblance of a massive castle, still warlike in its ruin. He slept for a

few hours that night in the Mission of Santa Ynes, and was high in the
Santa Barbara Mountains at the next noon. For brief whiles he forgot
his journey's purpose as his horse climbed slowly up the steep trails,
knocking the loose stones down a thousand feet and more upon a roof
of tree-tops which looked like stunted brush. Those gigantic masses of
immense stones, each wearing a semblance to the face of man or beast;
those awful chasms and stupendous heights, densely wooded,