For the Soul of Rafael

by Marah Ellis Ryan

"For the love of God, be cautious—cautious!" she whispered to the priest. And the latter drew the hood of his habit lower over his brows, to shut out the sun.

"Softly, Anita mia! From this moment I am under a vow of silence. This heretic and I have come out of the shadow of death together, he with a broken head and I with a broken arm. You can send your friends to see where three men are still unburied in the Trabuco hills. I ask of the Mission only time for silent meditation until my preserver, here, is better—or dead. I leave the words of it to you. From the moment help comes I have vowed silence. Come, come, Anita, girl. When we have blinded a woman like Raquel Arteaga for two days and nights, we need fear no eyes of men."

And it was so. The condition of the two men was warrant of Ana's recital that three refugees of Flores's bandits had assaulted the priest, with the idea that he was of the vigilantes. When the Americano, by some chance, had taken a short cut across the ranges, and, hearing shots, had gone to the rescue, he found one man with a broken arm keeping his enemies at a distance with one of their own guns. He had stumbled on their camp while they slept. For the rest, Ana asked Rafael to send some one to bury the three bodies. They were too near the trail to be left like that, and would frighten horses when one rode that way.

Of the padre, who, relieved of his burden, had quietly fallen in the rear, Doña Ana told that he was a travelling monk from Mexico, who had been entertained at the San Joaquin ranch, and had assisted the Don Keith to quell a crazy uprising there. He was under a vow of silence from the moment God sent help; and—and of course there was room for him at the Mission, not with the crusty old Padre Andros, but if Rafael and Raquel would allow him a private corner, undisturbed! He did not appear to be the sort of man for Padre Andros's game-cocks and monte games.

Rafael, glancing at the sallow, bearded face under the monk's hood, decided that she was right. The padre looked like a man given to vigils and fasts, one living the life of renunciation such as one heard of from the older records of the valley, before the secular priests had been let loose upon the land to fatten, while the parish drifted from faith.

"Padre Andros has been called to San Luis Rey; it will be a week until he returns. This man—what is his name? Libertad? That is very Mexican. Well, the Mission is his; he can pray where he chooses. God send he prays Don Keith well again. Santa Maria! but he has a fever! Does he know one?"

Ana shook her head. He certainly did not know her, and he did not know the padre, and she felt a hesitation in telling him that the only one whose voice or hand quieted the occasional ravings of the American was that of his own wife. If she had done so, Rafael would have only thought it a great joke on Raquel, who avoided heretics. All the hours of the days and nights in the hills, Raquel Arteaga had moved like a woman in a dream, walking alone when she was not praying beside Keith Bryton's couch of pine boughs. While Ana slept the sleep of exhaustion that first night, the silent priest had gone again and again to see Bryton and hear if there was aught to do, and each time that girl was crouching there, white-faced as a spirit in the light of the waning moon, while the man on the couch moaned "Espiritu! Doña Espiritu mia!"

That was the one moan he had made since the fever had struck him, and there had been no way of quieting him. But that night, when the moans grew into cries, the silent priest saw the girl listen until she could bear it no longer, and then she went closer to him and knelt there, her hands clasped tightly behind her, and in them the golden beads of a rosary shone against her black dress.

"I am here, close beside you," she said, lowly, "always beside you in spirit—always!"

"Espiritu mia!" he muttered, and then with a great sigh of relief sank into slumber.