"Because I hindered him from an act which, although innocent from its ignorance, I feared that his conscience would regret. I have prevented the father from paying adoration to the God of rain."
"What?" shouted Cabrera, retreating from the cross as if he had been stung, but at the same time staring at it with all his might.
"What?" repeated the priest with equal wonder, but more soberly. "What can be the reading of your strange riddle, my son?" he asked in amazement. "You stay me from the due reverence I would have hastened to pay to this most blessed symbol of our faith, and then you tell us—verily, my brain is perplexed—I know not what it is thou wouldst say!"
"I would say only that I have said," was the earnest answer. "Marvellous as it must appear to you, my father, marvellous as even yet it appears to me, it is nevertheless true, that the symbol, to us so sacred as the Christian symbol of salvation, is to these poor heathen people of this world the symbol of the God of rain."
"Umph," muttered Cabrera, eyeing the cross somewhat ruefully. "Father, I ever have so many penances lying upon my shoulders; shall I have yet another for having thus knelt in worship to a heathen god, and will it be a heavy one?"
"I were fain to say 'Yes' for thy levity," came the reply.
"Levity, i' faith!" ejaculated the young Spaniard. "My question arose from no careless merriment, I can assure you. But if I draw not a long face, like Toro yonder, with each word I say, I am ever twitted with my levity."
He turned away in one of his short-lived huffs, while the priest looked at him with no unkindly smile, and said more freely—
"Nay then, my son, pardon me. I do believe that now thou art something wounded in thy spirit, as I myself by now had likewise been, but for the ready thought and hand of our good friend here."
"Good to you, bad to me," retorted Cabrera. "If he could not speak in time to spare me the sin, and mortification, of bowing down to an idol he might have held his peace, and not thus have proclaimed my shame."