The padre thrust his thumbs under the white cord of his girdle and broke into a guffaw. “Thou jade!” he teased. “Wilt have Tony, eh? Well, I go to find him.” He gathered in his brown cassock, preparatory to stepping over the cacti here bordering the garden path. “But look you, if he comes scrape not the gilt from the wires of his pretty cage.”
Another threatening shake of the finger, and the padre crossed the low, spiked hedge and waddled away through the sun.
When he came into sight a moment later round the dun wall of the mission, he carried a canary at his shoulder. “E-oo, e-oo,” he cooed, pattering forward. “Loretta wished thy company. Sst! sst! She is bad after thee, Tony! But be wary, little one, be wary.”
The advice was wholly ignored. For, spying the parrot, Tony was instantly transformed from a silent, dumpy ball of yellow to a slim, dapper songster with a swelling throat.
Loretta greeted him with uproarious laughter, and a jargon of Spanish, patois, but triumphant. She paced the horizontal piece that gave her perch the form of a cross. She pur-r-red and gu-r-red. She swung by her curved beak and one leathery foot, shrilling her “Buenos días, señor!” Then, as the padre hung the cage to a nail in the trellis built against the wall, she changed her performance to the clamorous repeating of a mass.
Padre Alonzo was shocked. “Sst! sst!” he chided; “thou wicked big-ears!”
The noon angelus was ringing. He caught up book and gown. But before going he pulled at Loretta’s gaudy tail not unkindly, and chuckled as she edged toward Tony with many a naïve and fetching cock of her grey head.
High at the garden’s centre, nailed to a massive tree of wood, stood out the Sacrifice. From behind, fir and pine thrust their long green boughs, as if eager to screen that torn and unclad shape. From below, jasmine and geranium, carnation and rose, sent upward an unfailing incense.
That way, in the heat of mid-afternoon, came Padre Anzar. Thin-lipped, he was, and hollow-eyed. In one hand he held a trowel, in the other a knife. Down the front of his brown cassock, mingling at knee height with red brick stains from the chapel floor, were touches of fresh earth. Anzar the priest was for the moment Anzar the gardener.