murderers--remaining there within them. In later times, as the
conquering Spaniards overspread the land, many of these stations were
found, with nothing to tell save nameless bones of those who had died
there that God's will might be done.

"It is my conjecture, therefore, that this parchment case was found--how
many years after the death of him who owned it, who can tell?--in one of
the many stations that the savages thus ravaged; that the soldiers, or
whoever may have found it, brought it hither, the nearest important
abiding-place of our Order; and that, being carelessly examined, it was
carelessly thrown aside when found to contain, apparently, only the
little record of the work which our dead brother accomplished before God
granted him his crown of earthly martyrdom and so made quick his way to
heaven. Had the letter ever reached that 'first hand' for which the
writer says he waits to send it by, it assuredly would have come to the
knowledge of the gold-loving Spanish conquerors, and armies would have
gone forth to answer it. But our dead brother, having written it and
placed it in this fold of the parchment for safety until the chance to
send it southward should come, was cut off from life suddenly; and so,
of the prodigious marvel of which knowledge had so strangely come to
him, only this mute and hidden record remained."

"But the letter itself?" I asked, with more energy than politeness.
"What _is_ the story that it contains? What is this mystery? Tell me of
it first, and then explain as much as you please afterwards."

Fray Antonio smiled at me kindly. "Ah, you too are becoming excited," he
said. "But, truly, it is not fair that I should thus have kept you
waiting. Indeed, I am so full of it all that I forgot that as yet you
know nothing. Come out with me into the court-yard, where the light is
stronger--for the writing is very faint and pale--and I will read you
this letter in which so wonderful a story is set forth."

Together we passed out through a little door in the rear of the sacristy
into what had been the inner and smaller cloister court-yard of the old
convent--a lovely place in which a fountain set in a quaint stone basin
sparkled, and where warm sunshine fell upon the rippling water and upon
beds of sweet-smelling flowers. And here it was, standing among the
flowers in the sunshine, beside the quaint fountain, that Fray Antonio
read to me the letter--that in this strange fashion had come to us fr