The Americano, however, who stood before him did not offensively suggest these national qualities.  A man of middle height, strongly built, bronzed and slightly gray from the vicissitudes of years and exposure, he had an air of practical seriousness that commended itself to Father Pedro.  To his religious mind it suggested self-consciousness; expressed in the dialect of the stranger it only meant “business.”

“I’m rather glad I found you out here alone,” began the latter; “it saves time.  I haven’t got to take my turn with the rest, in there”—­he indicated the church with his thumb—­“and you haven’t got to make an appointment.  You have got a clear forty minutes before the Angelus rings,” he added, consulting a large silver chronometer, “and I reckon I kin git through my part of the job inside of twenty, leaving you ten minutes for remarks.  I want to confess.”

Father Pedro drew back with a gesture of dignity.  The stranger, however, laid his hand upon the Padre’s sleeve with the air of a man anticipating objection, but never refusal, and went on.

“Of course, I know.  You want me to come at some other time, and in there.  You want it in the reg’lar style.  That’s your way and your time.  My answer is:  it ain’t my way and my time.  The main idea of confession, I take it, is gettin’ at the facts.  I’m ready to give ’em if you’ll take ’em out here, now.  If you’re willing to drop the Church and confessional, and all that sort o’ thing, I, on my side, am willing to give up the absolution, and all that sort o’ thing.  You might,” he added, with an unconscious touch of pathos in the suggestion, “heave in a word or two of advice after I get through; for instance, what you’d do in the circumstances, you see!  That’s all.  But that’s as you please.  It ain’t part of the business.”

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 belayin-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.