“Well, I’ve seen lots of _penitente_ processions, but the best one I ever saw was a long time ago, when I was a little kid. There are not so many of them now, and they don’t do as much as they used to. The church is down on them, you know, and they’re afraid. Ten years ago if you tried to look at them, they would shoot at you, but now tourists take pictures of them.” Gordon Roth’s curiosity had been aroused. “Tell me,” he broke in. “What is the meaning of this thing? How did it get started?” “I don’t know exactly,” Ramon admitted. “My grandfather told me that they brought it over from Spain centuries ago, and the Indians here had a sort of whipping fraternity, and the two got mixed up, I guess. The church used to tolerate it; it was a regular religious festival. But now it’s outlawed. They still have a lot of political power. They all vote the same way. One man that was elected to Congress—they say that the _penitente_ stripes on his back carried him there. And he was a gringo too. But I don’t know. It may be a lie.…” “But tell us about that procession you saw when you were a little boy,” Julia broke in. She was leaning forward with her chin in her hand, and her big grey eyes, wide with interest, fixed upon his face. “Well, I was only about ten years old, and I was riding home from one of our ranches with my father. We were coming through _Tijeras_ canyon. It was March, and there was snow on the ground in patches, and the mountains were cold and bare, and I remember I thought I was going to freeze. Every little while we would get off and set fire to a tumble-weed by the road, and warm our hands and then go on again.… “Anyway, pretty soon I heard a lot of men singing, all together, in deep voices, and the noise echoed around the canyon and sounded awful solemn. And I could hear, too, the slap of the big wide whips coming down on the bare backs, wet with blood, like slapping a man with a wet towel, only louder. I didn’t know what it was, but my father did, and he called to me and we spurred our horses right up the mountain, and hid in a clump of cedar up there. Then they came around a bend in the road, and I began to cry because they were all covered with blood, and one of them fell down.… My father slapped me and told me to shut up, or they would come and shoot us.” “But what did they look like? What were they doing?” Julia demanded frowning at him, impatient with his rambling narrative.