Page:Death Comes for the Archbishop.pdf/186

 “Comete tu cola, Martinez, comete tu cola!” (Eat your tail, Martinez, eat your tail!) Almost at once he died in a convulsion.

After day-break Trinidad went forth declaring (and the Mexican women confirmed him) that at the moment of death Father Lucero had looked into the other world and beheld Padre Martinez in torment. As long as the Christians who were about that death-bed lived, the story was whispered in Arroyo Hondo.

When the floor of the priest’s house was taken up, according to his last instructions, people came from as far as Taos and Santa Cruz and Mora to see the buckskin bags of gold and silver coin that were buried beneath it. Spanish coins, French, American, English, some of them very old. When it was at length conveyed to a Government mint and examined, it was valued at nearly twenty thousand dollars in American money. A great sum for one old priest to have scraped together in a country parish down at the bottom of a ditch.