olden guide! For:--it fell out that a day
later as he was hunting to the south, he was surrounded and taken
prisoner by the savages who range by the inland sea of California. The
gold had a hole as you see, he pulled hair from his head, tied the
nugget in the braid, and thus hid it for the next two years of his
life. The girl he never again heard of. She would die of a certainty
alone in the desert.

"A missionary of our order found the man in the wilderness. They were
exiles, the two for the length of a winter, and the Greek listened to
the tales of the lost fleet on which Don Teo sought the new world, and
also of the royal order for his arrest following on the next ship. For
a prisoner of Solyman the Magnificent had escaped from the galleys of
the Turk, and wild tales were told of princes of the North who gave
aid to the traffic in Christian slaves. Don Teo was by all means to be
taken back to Spain that the Holy Office learn through him the names
and numbers of the offenders!"

"Good it is to hear that the varlet was not let sleep sound all the
night!" decided Don Ruy.

"It appears there were many nights when sleep kept from him--to judge
by his confessions!" said the priest. But to go into deeper hell while
he was yet alive did not march with his wishes, and while he half
inclined to the desert again, that he might die quietly there as any
other starved wild thing does die:--a thing came which he had not
thought:--the padre died of a serpent's sting, and he, Teo the Greek,
was alone, and apart from the world again!

"It was the gown for which the savages had reverence--and he took the
consecrated robe from the dead padre and wore it--he had been driven
by misfortune back to Holy Church!

"He lived under the name of the padre as a priest in holy orders. His
reports to his superior were well counterfeited as the writing of the
man he had buried. He held that mission as the extreme outpost for
three years. He died there of a fever, but not until I had found him,
and confessed him. The gold and the tale of his wanderings he gave to
me. Much of it he told me more than once, for when men are exiles as
he was for those several years, the things of the old life loom up big
with significance. He felt that he was the _finder_ of _the way_, and
that mayhaps, Mother Church, so long forgotten by him, would be the
richer that he had lived. Masses were said for the girl dead in the
desert. She had saved him, and for a little