Page:Death Comes for the Archbishop.pdf/77

 the white mules, their coats wet and matted into tufts, had turned a slaty hue, and the faces of the two priests were purple and spotted in that singular light.

Father Latour rode first, sitting straight upon his mule, with his chin lowered just enough to keep the drive of rain out of his eyes. Father Vaillant followed, unable to see much,—in weather like this his glasses were of no use, and he had taken them off. He crouched down in the saddle, his shoulders well over Contento’s neck. Father Joseph’s sister, Philomène, who was Mother Superior of a convent in her native town in the Puy-de-Dôm, often tried to picture her brother and Bishop Latour on these long missionary journeys of which he wrote her; she imagined the scene and saw the two priests moving through it in their cassocks, bare-headed, like the pictures of St. Francis Xavier with which she was familiar. The reality was less picturesque,—but for all that, no one could have mistaken these two men for hunters or traders. They wore clerical collars about their necks instead of neckerchiefs, and on the breast of his buckskin jacket the Bishop’s silver cross hung by a silver chain.

They were on their way to Mora, the third day out, and they did not know just how far they had still to go. Since morning they had not met a traveller or seen a human habitation. They believed they were on