the savages of
the new world had done me wrong by sending him to hell before I could
even spell his name for curses!"

"My son! You are doing murder in your heart!" and Padre Vicente held
up the crucifix with trembling hand.

"That I am!" agreed Gonzalvo and laughed, and laid himself down again
to rest on his saddle.--"Does it call for penance to kill a venomous
thing?"

"A human soul!" admonished the priest.

"Then he came by such soul later in life than his record shows trace
of!" declared Juan Gonzalvo, and this time the priest was silent.

"In truth, report does stand by our friend in that," agreed Don Diego.
"He lived as a Turk among the Turkish pirates, and was never so much a
Christian as are those who serve as devils, in the flames of the pit.
To slay the infidel is not to slay a soul, good father,--or--if you
are of that mind," he added with an attempt at lightness which sat ill
on him--so stiff it was as he eyed the still priest warily,--"if you
are of that mind, we can never grow dull for argument in the desert
marches. In the Holy Office godly men of the Faith work daily and
nightly on that question even now in Christian Spain."

The priest shuddered, and fingered his beads. Well they knew in those
days the "question" and "Holy office" in Christian Spain. The rack
loomed large enough to cast its shadow even to the new found shores at
the other side of the world!

And plainly he read also that two otherwise genial gentlemen of the
cavalcade were equipped well for all fanatic labor where Holy Cross or
personal hates were to be defended. It is well to know one's comrades,
and the subject of the Greek had opened doors of strange revelation to
him.

"The mind which is of God and of the Holy Mother Church is the mind
for the judgments of souls," said Padre Vicente after a silence. "We
may thank the saints that we are not called on to condemn utterly any
of God's children."

"But what of the Devil's?" asked Don Diego plainly not satisfied with
the evasive reply where he had least expected it. "What of the
children of the darkness and the Evil One?"

Padre Vicente, of the wild tribes, looked around the group and smiled.
Scarce a man of them without at least one lost life to his record--and
more than one with murders enough on his list to have won him
sainthood if all had been done for the Faith:--which they were not!
Back of them crouched dusky Indians of the village, watching with
eager yet apparentl