The Bells of San Gabriel
I The Senor Capitan Don Luis de la Torre walked impatiently up and down before the grist-mill wherein were quartered the soldiers sent by Mexico to protect the building of the Mission of San Gabriel. The Indian workmen were slugs; California, a vast region inhabited only by savages and a few priests, offered slender attractions to a young officer craving the gay pleasures of his capital and the presence of the woman he was to marry. For months he had watched the mission church mount slowly from foundation to towers, then spread into pillared corridors and rooms for the
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