Well; what if he had? A priest could not testify about what he had heard in confessional. But a priest might tell some one else.… O, God! If the man would only go and leave him to think. Hell and murder, murder and hell. The two words beat upon his brain without mercy. He longed to interrupt the priest and beg him to leave off. But for some reason he could not. He could not even turn his head and look at the man. The priest was but a clammy grip that held him and a disembodied voice that spoke of hell and murder. Had he done murder? And was there a hell? He had long ceased to believe in hell, but hell had been real to him as a child. His mother and his nurse had filled him with the fear of hell. He had been bred in the fear of hell. It was in his flesh and bones if not in his mind, and the priest had hypnotized his mind. Hell was real to him again. Fear of hell came up from the past which vanishes but is never gone, and gripped him like a great ugly monster. It squeezed a cold sweat out of his body and made his skin prickle and his breath come short.… The priest dropped the subject of hell, and spoke again of the mass. He mentioned a sum of money. Ramon nodded his head muttering his assent like a sick man. The grip on his hand relaxed. “Good-bye, my little brother,” murmured the priest. “May Christ be always with you.” His gown rustled across the room and as he opened the door, Ramon saw his face for a moment—a sallow, shrewd face, bedewed with the sweat of a great effort, but wearing a smile of triumphant satisfaction. Ramon lay sick and exhausted. It seemed to him that there was no air in the room. He was suffocating. His body burned and prickled. He rose and tore loose his collar. He must get out of this place, must have air and movement. It was dusk now. The wailing of the old women had ceased. Doubtless they were being rewarded with supper. He began stripping off his clothes—his white shirt and his new suit of black. Eagerly rummaging in the closet he found his old clothes, which he wore on his trips to the mountains. In the dim light he slipped out of the house, indistinguishable from any Mexican boy that might have been about the place. He saddled the little mare in the corral, mounted and galloped away—through Old Town, where skinny dogs roamed in dark narrow streets and men and women sat and smoked in black doorways—and out upon the valley road. There he spurred his mare without mercy, and they flew over the soft dust. The rush of the air in his face, and the thud and quiver of living flesh under him were infinitely sweet. He stopped at last five miles from town on the bank of the river. It was a swift muddy river, wandering about in a flood plain a quarter of a mile wide, and at this point chewing noisily at a low bank forested with scrubby cottonwoods.