"No more do I," said Rayburn. "It's a first-rate sermon that he's giving us, but I don't see where he means the moral of it to fetch up."
For myself, so closely were Fray Antonio and I bound together by bonds of sympathy, I saw but too plainly what he meant should be the outcome of his discourse; and I was not surprised, therefore—though hearing thus plainly expressed in words what I had been dreading, sent a dull, cold pain into the very depths of my heart—when he unfolded to us the whole of the plan that he had been forming within his mind. What he said was said very simply, and with a loving sorrow for the pain that might come to us through shaping our actions in accordance with his strong desire; and this desire was: that, of our own free-will, we should retire from the valley by the way that we came thither, and so leave the Council free to accept unhesitatingly the Priest Captain's terms.
"And what of yourself?" I asked; for I felt within me a strong conviction that for himself he had in view a very different fate.
He hesitated for a moment before answering me, and his color changed a little; and then an unwonted ruddiness gave animation to his face, and a light of glad and strong resolve shone in his eyes as he replied, in a voice that was very low, and at the same time very clear and firm: "I shall go to the Priest Captain, in Culhuacan!"
"And so go to your death," I said, speaking brokenly, for the pain that his words caused me went through me like a knife-thrust.
"Say, rather," Fray Antonio answered, "that I go to win the life, glorious and eternal, into which neither death nor sin nor sorrow evermore can come!"
XXVIII.
THE SURRENDER OF A LIFE.
Knowing as I did Fray Antonio's resolute nature, and understanding far more clearly than it was possible for the others to understand the heroic impulses which stirred within him, I took no part in the attempt that they then made to oppose the purpose which he had declared. But when they somewhat shifted their position—perceiving how hopeless was their effort to shake by argument his firm resolve—and sought to win him to their way of thinking by consenting to leave the valley if only he would accompany them, then I most earnestly joined my entreaties to theirs. But no more by entreaty than by argument was Fray Antonio to be moved.