For from a corner of the peaceful old Mission garden at one end of the long street one might catch a glimpse of the Casa Blanca at the other end sprawling in the sun; between the two sturdy walled buildings had the town strung itself as it grew. As old a relic as the church itself was La Casa Blanca, and since San Juan could remember, in all matters antipodal to the religious calm of the padres' monument. Deep-shaded doorways let into the three-feet-thick earthen walls, waxed floors, green tables, and bar and cool looking-glasses . . . a place which invited, lured, held, and frequently enough finally damned. San Juan, in the languid philosophy of Ignacio Chavez, was what you will. It epitomized the universe. You had everything here which the soul of man might covet. Never having dwelt elsewhere since his mother bore him here upon the rim of the desert and with the San Juan mountains so near that, Ignacio Chavez pridefully knew, a man standing upon the Mesa Alta might hear the ringing of his bells, he experienced a pitying contempt for all those other spots in the world which were so plainly less favored. What do you wish, senor? Fine warm days? You have them here. Nice cool nights for sound slumber? Right here in San Juan, _amigo mio_. A desert across which the eye may run without stopping until it be tired, a wonderful desert whereon at dawn and dusk God weaves all of the alluring soft mists of mystery? Shaded canons at noonday with water and birds and flowers? Behold the mountains. Everything desirable, in short. That there might be men who desired the splash of waves, the sheen of wet beaches, the boom of surf, did not suggest itself to one who had never seen the ocean. So, then, San Juan was "what you will." A man may fix his eye upon the little Mission cross which is always pointing to heaven and God; or he may pass through the shaded doors of the Casa Blanca, which, men say, give pathway into hell the shortest way. Ignacio, having meditatively enjoyed his whiskey and listened smilingly to the tinkle of a mandolin in the _patio_ under a grape-vine arbor, had rolled his cigarette and turned his back square upon the devil . . . of whom he had no longer anything to ask. As he went out he stopped in the doorway long enough to rub his back against a corner of the wall and to strike a match. Then, almost inaudibly humming the mandolin air, he slouched out into the burning street.