“Exactly at six o’clock, I shall see a figure come out on the roof of the mission and stand in front of the old gallows-frame on which hang eight chimes that were carried in on mules from the City of Mexico when Junipero Serra planted the cross of Catholicism at San Diego, in 1769.  That distant figure will be Brother Flavio, of the Franciscan Order, and the old boy is going to ramp up and down in front of those chimes with a hammer and give me a concert.  He’ll bang out ‘Adeste Fideles’ and ‘Gloria in Excelsis.’  That’s a cinch, because he’s a creature of habit.  Occasionally he plays ‘Lead, Kindly Light’ and ’Ave Maria’!”

Farrel paused, a faint smile of amusement fringing his handsome mouth.  He rolled and lighted a cigarette and continued: 

“My father wrote me that old Brother Flavio, after a terrible battle with his own conscience and at the risk of being hove out of the valley by his indignant superior, Father Dominic, was practising ’Hail, The Conquering Hero Comes!’ against the day of my home-coming.  I wrote father to tell Brother Flavio to cut that out and substitute ’In the Good Old Summertime’ if he wanted to make a hit with me.  Awfully good old hunks, Brother Flavio!  He knows I like those old chimes, and, when I’m home, he most certainly bangs them so the melody will carry clear up to the Palomar.”

The captain was gazing with increasing amazement upon his former first sergeant.  After eighteen months, he had discovered a man he had not known heretofore.”

“And after the ’Angelus’—­what?” he demanded.

Farrel’s smug little smile of complacency had broadened.

“Well, sir, when Brother Flavio pegs out, I’ll get up and run down to the Mission, where Father Dominic, Father Andreas, Brother Flavio, Brother Anthony, and Brother Benedict will all extend a welcome and muss me up, and we’ll all talk at once and get nowhere with the conversation for the first five minutes.  Brother Anthony is just a little bit—­ah—­nutty, but harmless.  He’ll want to know how many men I’ve killed, and I’ll tell him two hundred and nineteen.  He has a leaning toward odd numbers, as tending more toward exactitude.  Right away, he’ll go into the chapel and pray for their souls, and while he’s at this pious exercise, Father Dominic will dig up a bottle of old wine that’s too good for a nut like Brother Anthony, and we’ll sit on a bench in the mission garden in the shade of the largest bougainvillea in the world and tuck away the wine.  Between tucks, Father Dominic will inquire casually into the state of my soul, and the information thus elicited will scandalize the old saint.  The only way I can square myself is to go into the chapel with them and give thanks for my escape from the Bolsheviki.

“By that time, it will be a quarter of seven and dark, so Father Dominic will crank up a prehistoric little automobile my father gave him in order that he might spread himself over San Marcos County on Sundays and say two masses.  I have a notion that the task of keeping that old car in running order has upset Brother Anthony’s mental balance.  He used to be a blacksmith’s helper in El Toro in his youth, and therefore is supposed to be a mechanic in his old age.”