Our dusty guide led us hurriedly from plot to plot.
"They say the mothers cheat the priests, and there are babies over yonder that ought to be here, for the breath was out of them before ever they were baptized. They say the priests had this man done to death one night, because he wrote against religion. He was only twenty-two. The club he belonged to put up that stone. They say there are evil words on it. But I don't know myself. I can't read, thanks to God. They say it was through reading and writing that most of these came here."
"But those are not evil words," I answered. "They are, 'Believe in Jesus and thou shalt be saved.'"
He hastily crossed himself, "Do me the favor not to read such words out loud. Here is another, where they say the words are words of hell."
I held my peace this time, musing on that broad marble with its one deep-cut line, "The Death of God."
"And over there," he croaked, pointing with his clay-colored thumb, "is Whiskers."
The señorita, whose black eyes had been getting larger and larger, gave a little scream and fairly ran for the gate.
Spaniards have usually great sympathy for criminals, newspaper accounts of executions often closing with an entreaty for God's mercy on "this poor man's soul," but Whiskers, the Madrid sensation of a fortnight since, was a threefold murderer. Passion-mad, he had shot dead in the open street a neighbor's youthful wife, held the public at bay with his revolver, and mortally wounded two Civil Guards, before he turned the fatal barrel on himself.
"His family wanted him laid over the way," continued that scared undertone at my ear, "but the bishop said no. A murderer like that was just as bad as infidels and Protestants, and should be buried out of grace."
I felt as if Superstition incarnate were walking by my side, and after one more look at that strangely peopled patch of unconsecrated ground, with its few untrimmed cypresses and straggling rose bushes, hillside slopes about and glory-flooded skies above, I gave Superstition a peseta, which he devoutly kissed, and returned to the cab, followed by the carol of a solitary bird.