Padre Ignatius always said that his flock were true and devout Catholics, who believed in what they ought to believe. Strictly speaking, the flock of Padre Ignatius was limited to the congregation of a little adobe church on the outskirts of the town, but his large heart included the whole population of Tlatonac in that ecclesiastical appellation. Everyone knew the Padre and everyone loved him, Jesuit though he was. For fifty years had he laboured in the vineyard of Tlatonac, but when his fellow-labourers were banished, the Government had not the heart to bid him go. So he stayed on, the only representative of his order in all Cholacaca, and prayed and preached and did charitable works, as had been his custom these many years past. With his thin, worn face, rusty cassock, slouch hat, and kindly smile, Padre Ignatius, wonderfully straight considering his seventy years, attended to the spiritual wants of his people, and said they were devout Catholics. He always over-estimated human nature, did the Padre. So far as the Padre saw, this might have been the case, and nobody having the heart to undeceive him, he grew to believe that these half-civilised savages were Christians to the bone; but there was no doubt that nine out of every ten in his flock were very black sheep indeed. They would kneel before the gaudy shrine of the adobe chapel, and say an Ave for every bead of the rosary, but at one time or another every worshipper was missing, each in his or her turn. They had been to the forest for this thing, for that thing; they had been working on the railway fifty miles inland, or fishing some distance up the coast. Such were the excuses they gave, and Padre Ignatius, simple-hearted soul, believed them, never dreaming that they had been assisting in the worship of the Chalchuih Tlatonac in the hidden temple of Huitzilopochtli.