that the impending struggle
would drench the land in blood.

As to the _role_ which Wenceslas would play, he could form no
satisfactory estimate. He knew him to be astute, wary, and the
shrewdest of politicians. He knew, likewise, that he was acting in
conjunction with powerful financial interests in both North America
and Europe. He knew him to be a man who would stop at no scruple,
hesitate at no dictate of conscience, yield to no moral or ethical
code; one who would play Rome against Wall Street, with his own
unfortunate country as the stake; one who would hurl the fairest sons
of Colombia at one another's throats to bulge his own coffers; and
then wring from the wailing widows their poor substance for Masses to
move their beloved dead through an imagined purgatory.

But he could not know that, in casting about impatiently for an
immediate _causus belli_, Wenceslas had hit upon poor, isolated,
little Simiti as the point of ignition, and the pitting of its
struggling priest against Don Mario as the method of exciting the
necessary spark. He could not know that Wenceslas had represented
to the Departmental Governor in Cartagena that an obscure _Cura_ in
far-off Simiti, an exile from the Vatican, and the author of a
violent diatribe against papal authority, was the nucleus about
which anticlerical sentiment was crystallizing in the Department
of Bolivar. He did not know that the Governor had been induced by the
acting-Bishop's specious representations to send arms to Simiti, to
be followed by federal troops only when the crafty Wenceslas saw
that the time was ripe. He did not even suspect that Don Mario was
to be the puppet whom Wenceslas would sacrifice on the altar of
rapacity when he had finished with him, and that the simple-minded
Alcalde in his blind zeal to protect the Church would thereby
proclaim himself an enemy of both Church and State, and afford the
smiling Wenceslas the most fortuitous of opportunities to reveal the
Church's unexampled magnanimity by throwing her influence in with
that of the Government against their common enemy.

His own intercourse with Wenceslas during the years of his exile in
Simiti had been wholly formal, and not altogether disagreeable as long
as the contributions of gold to the Bishop's leaking coffers
continued. He had received almost monthly communications from
Cartagena, relating to the Church at large, and, at infrequent
intervals, to the parish of Simiti. But he knew that