Captain Fly-By-Night by Johnston McCulley — Read

A grey dawn came that morning to San Diego de Alcalá, for the heavy fog hung like a pall over the valley, rolling in great billows against the hills. The mission bells rang, and into the church trooped frailes, soldiers, ranch owners, loyal neophytes, none appearing more devout than those same soldiers whose license and cruelty had done much to make the Indians dissatisfied and undo the work of the frailes. Collectively they may have been a boisterous, fighting, drinking, gambling lot -- but individually they were properly religious.

The _comandante_ had taken charge and done everything possible in preparing the defence. It had come to a question of deciding between presidio and mission, for there were not men enough to defend both. It was a question, too, which the hostiles would attack first -- the presidio offered arms and ammunition, food and wine; the mission offered more loot. Did the savages have greater hatred for the soldiers or the "long gowns"? -- that was the question the _comandante_ would have liked to have had answered.