THE STRANGER.
Father Seraphin and Don Pablo we left bearing the wounded man to the missionary's lodging. Although the house to which they were proceeding was but a short distance off, yet the two gentlemen, compelled to take every precaution, employed considerable time on the journey. Nearly every step they were compelled to halt, so as not to fatigue too greatly the wounded man, whose inert limbs swayed in every direction.
"The man is dead," Don Pablo remarked, during a halt they made on the Plaza de la Merced.
"I fear so," the missionary answered, sadly; "still, as we are not certain of it, our conscience bids us to bestow our care on him, until we acquire the painful conviction that it avails him nought."
"Father, the love of one's neighbour often carries you too far; better were it, perhaps, if this wretch did not come back to life."
"You are severe, my friend. This man is still young—almost a boy. Trained amid a family of bandits, never having aught but evil examples before him, he has hitherto only done evil, in a spirit of imitation. Who knows whether this fearful wound may not offer him the means to enter the society of honest people, which he has till now been ignorant of? I repeat to you, my friend, the ways of the Lord are inscrutable."
"I will do what you wish, father. You have entire power over me. Still, I fear that all our care will be thrown away."
"God, whose humble instruments we are, will prove you wrong, I hope. Come, a little courage, a few paces further, and we shall have arrived."
"Come on then," Don Pablo said with resignation.
Father Seraphin lodged at a house of modest appearance, built of adobes and reeds, in a small room he hired from a poor widow, for the small sum of nine reals a month. This room, very small, and which only received air from a window opening on an inner yard, was a perfect conventual cell, as far as furniture was concerned, for the latter consisted of a wooden frame, over which a bull hide was stretched, and served as the missionary's bed; a butaca and a prie-dieu, above which a copper crucifix was fastened to the whitewashed wall. But, like all cells, this room was marvellously clean. From a few nails hung the well-worn clothes of the poor priest, and a shelf supported vials and flasks which doubtless contained medicaments; for, like all the missionaries, Father Seraphin had a rudimentary knowledge of medicine, and took in charge both the souls and bodies of his neophytes.