Father Carillo stood on deck and watched the white mission under the mountain narrow to a thread, the kneeling priests become dots of reflected light.  His exaltation vanished.  He was no longer the chief figure in a picturesque panorama.  He set his lips and his teeth behind them.  He was a very ambitious man.  His dreams leapt beyond California to the capital of Spain.  If he returned with his savages, he might make success serve as half the ladder.  But would he return?

Wind and weather favoured him.  Three days after leaving Santa Barbara he sighted a long narrow mountainous island.  He had passed another of different proportions in the morning, and before night sighted still another, small and oval.  But the lofty irregular mass, some ten miles long and four miles wide, which he approached at sundown, was the one he sought.  The night world was alight under the white blaze of the moon; the captain rode into a small harbour at the extreme end of the island and cast anchor, avoiding reefs and shoals as facilely as by midday.  Father Carillo gave his Indians orders to be ready to march at dawn.

The next morning the priest arrayed himself in his white satin garments, embroidered about the skirt with gold and on the chest with a purple cross pointed with gold.  The brown woollen habit of his voyage was left behind.  None knew better than he the value of theatric effect upon the benighted mind.  His Indians wore gayly striped blankets of their own manufacture, and carried baskets containing presents and civilized food.

Bearing a large gilt cross, Father Carillo stepped on shore, waved farewell to the captain, and directed his Indians to keep faithfully in the line of march:  they might come upon the savages at any moment.  They toiled painfully through a long stretch of white sand, then passed into a grove of banana trees, dark, cold, noiseless, but for the rumble of the ocean.  When they reached the edge of the grove, Father Carillo raised his cross and commanded the men to kneel.  Rumour had told him what to expect, and he feared the effect on his simple and superstitious companions.  He recited a chaplet, then, before giving them permission to rise, made a short address.

“My children, be not afraid at what meets your eyes.  The ways of all men are not our ways.  These people have seen fit to leave their dead unburied on the surface of the earth.  But these poor bones can do you no more harm than do those you have placed beneath the ground in Santa Barbara.  Now rise and follow me, nor turn back as you fear the wrath of God.”

He turned and strode forward, with the air of one to whom fear had no meaning; but even he closed his eyes for a moment in horror.  The poor creatures behind mumbled and crossed themselves and clung to each other.  The plain was a vast charnel-house.  The sun, looking over the brow of an eastern hill, threw its pale rays upon thousands of crumbling skeletons, bleached by unnumbered suns, picked bare by dead and