Irreverent as this speech appeared, there was really no trace of such intention in his manner, and his evident profound conviction that his suggestion was practical, and not at all inconsistent with ecclesiastical dignity, would alone have been enough to touch the Padre, had not the stranger’s dominant personality already overridden him.  He hesitated.  The stranger seized the opportunity to take his arm, and lead him with the half familiarity of powerful protection to a bench beneath the refectory window.  Taking out his watch again, he put it in the passive hands of the astonished priest, saying, “Time me,” cleared his throat, and began:—­

“Fourteen years ago there was a ship cruisin’ in the Pacific, jest off this range, that was ez nigh on to a Hell afloat as anything rigged kin be.  If a chap managed to dodge the cap’en’s belaying-pin for a time he was bound to be fetched up in the ribs at last by the mate’s boots.  There was a chap knocked down the fore hatch with a broken leg in the Gulf, and another jumped overboard off Cape Corrientes, crazy as a loon, along a clip of the head from the cap’en’s trumpet.  Them’s facts.  The ship was a brigantine, trading along the Mexican coast.  The cap’en had his wife aboard, a little timid Mexican woman he’d picked up at Mazatlan.  I reckon she didn’t get on with him any better than the men, for she ups and dies one day, leavin’ her baby, a year-old gal.  One o’ the crew was fond o’ that baby.  He used to get the black nurse to put it in the dingy, and he’d tow it astern, rocking it with the painter like a cradle.  He did it—­hatin’ the cap’en all the same.  One day the black nurse got out of the dingy for a moment, when the baby was asleep, leavin’ him alone with it.  An idea took hold on him, jest from cussedness, you’d say, but it was partly from revenge on the cap’en and partly to get away from the ship.  The ship was well in shore, and the current settin’ towards it.  He slipped the painter—­that man—­and set himself adrift with the baby.  It was a crazy act, you’d reckon, for there was n’t any oars in the boat; but he had a crazy man’s luck, and he contrived, by sculling the boat with one of the seats he tore out, to keep her out of the breakers, till he could find a bight in the shore to run her in.  The alarm was given from the ship, but the fog shut down upon him; he could hear the other boats in pursuit.  They seemed to close in on him, and by the sound he judged the cap’en was just abreast of him in the gig, bearing down upon him in the fog.  He slipped out of the dingy into the water without a splash, and struck out for the breakers.  He got ashore after havin’ been knocked down and dragged in four times by the undertow.  He had only one idea then, thankfulness that he had not taken the baby with him in the surf.  You kin put that down for him; it’s a fact.  He got off into the hills, and made his way up to Monterey.”

“And the child?” asked the Padre, with a sudden and strange asperity that boded no good to the penitent; “the child thus ruthlessly abandoned—­what became of it?”