Beau Ideal

Book excerpt: "My brother caught the priest and Dolores.... In the priest's own church.... My brother married them before the altar ... and their married life was brief!... But of course, God knew he was mad.... As he left that desecrated church, he cried, 'Never will I enter the House of God, again!...' "And that very night the big earthquake came and shattered our village with a dozen others. As we dashed through the door--the old mother in my brother's arms, my crippled sister on my back--the roof caved in and the very road fell from before our little posada, down the hillside. My brother was in front and fell, my mother still in his arms.... And where did he recover consciousness? Tell me that!... Before the altar, upon the dead body of his victim, the murdered priest--who thus saved my brother's life, for he had fallen thirty feet from the half-destroyed church-roof, through which he had crashed.... Yes, he had entered the House of God once more!... "It was to South America that he fled from the police--to that El Dorado where so many of us go in search of what we never find. And there he went from worse to worse than worst, defying God and slaying man ... and woman! For he shot his own woman merely because she knelt--just went on her knees to God.... And one terrible night of awful storm, when fleeing alone by mountain paths from the soldiers or guardias civiles, a flash of lightning showed him a ruined building, and into it he dashed and hid. "It may have been the rolling thunder, the streaming rain, or an avalanche of stones dislodged by the horses of the police who passed along the path above--I do not know--but there was a terrible crash, a heavy blow, a blinding, suffocating dust--and he was pinned, trapped, held as in a giant fist, unable to move hand or foot, or head.