ore it open and read, "The Hercules ordered to Simiti."

"Ah," he sighed, sinking into his chair. "At last! The President
interferes! And now a wire to Ames. And--_Caramba_, yes! A message to
the captain of the Hercules to bring me that girl!"

* * * * *

"Well, old man, I've done all I could to stave off the blundering
idiot; but I guess you are in for it! The jig is up, I'm thinking!"

It was Reed talking. Simiti again slept, while the American and Jose
in the _sacristia_ talked long and earnestly. Fernando kept guard at
the door. The other prisoners lay wrapped in slumber.

"Your message went down the river two days ago," continued Reed. "And,
believe me! since then I've racked my dusty brain for topics to keep
the Alcalde occupied and forgetful of you. But I'm dryer than a desert
now; and he vows that to-morrow you and your friends will be dragged
out of this old shack by your necks, and then shot."

The two days had been filled with exquisite torture for Jose. Only the
presence of Carmen restrained him from rushing out and ending it all.
Her faith had been his constant marvel. Every hour, every moment, she
knew only the immanence of her God; whereas he, obedient to the
undulating Rincon character-curve, expressed the mutability of his
faith in hourly alternations of optimism and black despair. After
periods of exalted hope, stimulated by the girl's sublime confidence,
there would come the inevitable backward rush of all the chilling
fear, despondency, and false thought which he had just expelled in
vain, and he would be left again floundering helplessly in the dismal
labyrinth of terrifying doubts.

The quiet which enwrapped them during these days of imprisonment; the
gloom-shrouded church; the awed hush that lay upon them in the
presence of the dead Lazaro, stimulated the feeble and sensitive
spirit of the priest to an unwonted degree of introspection, and he
sat for hours gazing blankly into the ghastly emptiness of his past.

He saw how at the first, when Carmen entered his life with the
stimulus of her buoyant faith, there had seemed to follow an emptying
of self, a quick clearing of his mentality, and a replacement of much
of the morbid thought, which clung limpet-like to his mentality, by
new and wonderfully illuminating ideas. For a while he had seemed to
be on the road to salvation; he felt that he had touched the robe of
the Christ, and heavenly virtue had