know that last pleading cry of Mary
Marchland's, for Jondo to protect her child, and how Clarenden, for love
of this brave man, came to New Mexico on perilous trails to take the
little Eloise from you. And lastly in this matter, the threats to force
a marriage unholy in God's sight, because no love could go with it. Your
mad chase and villainous intention to use brute force to secure your
will out yonder on the rocks above the cliff. You have debauched an
Apache boy, making him your tool and spy. You sanctioned the seizing of
a Hopi girl whose parents you permitted to be murdered, and their child
sold into slavery among foreign tribes. You have stirred up and kept
alive a feud of hatred and revenge among the Kiowa people against the
life and property of Esmond Clarenden and all who belong to him. And,
added to all these, you stand to-day a patricide in spirit, accused of
plotting for the murder of your own father. Do not these things call
for restoration and repentance?"

Ferdinand Ramero rose to his feet and stood in the aisle near the door.
His face hardened, and all the suave polish and cool concentration and
dominant magnetism fell away. What remained was the man as shaped by the
ruling passions of years, from whose control only divine power could
bring deliverance. And when he spoke there was a remorseless cruelty and
selfishness in his low, even tones.

"You have called me a plotter for my father's life--based on some lying
Mexican's love of blackmail. You do not even try to prove your charge.
The man who would have killed him was Theron St. Vrain, and his brother,
Bertrand. That Theron was disgraced by the fact you know very well, and
the blackness of it drove him to an early grave. So this young lady
here, whom I would have shielded from this stain upon her name in the
marriage to my son, may know the truth about her father. He was what
you, Father Josef, try to prove me to be."

He paused as if to gather venom for his last shaft.

"These two, Theron and Bertrand, were equally guilty, but through tricks
of their own, Theron escaped and Bertrand took the whole crime on
himself. He disappeared and paid the penalty by his death. His body was
recovered from the river and placed in an unmarked grave. Why go back to
that now? Because Bertrand St. Vrain's clothes alone on some poor
drowned unknown man were buried. Bertrand himself sits here beside his
niece, Eloise St. Vrain. John Doe to the world, the man who lives