"You're a man of education," the lieutenant said. He lay across the entrance of the hut with his head on his rolled cape and his revolver by his side. It was night, but neither man could sleep. The priest, when he shifted, groaned a little with stiffness and cramp. The lieutenant was in a hurry to get home, and they had ridden till midnight. They were down off the hills and in the marshy plain. Soon the whole State would be subdivided by swamp. The rains had really begun.
"I'm not that. My father was a storekeeper."
"I mean, you've been abroad. You can talk like a Yankee. You've had schooling."
"Yes."
"I've had to think things out for myself. But there are some things which you don't have to learn in a school. That there are rich and poor." He said in a low voice, "I've shot three hostages because of you. Poor men. It made me hate you."
"Yes," the priest admitted, and tried to stand to ease the cramp in his right thigh. The lieutenant sat up quickly, gun in hand: "What are you doing?"
"Nothing. Just cramp. That's all." He lay down again with a groan.
The lieutenant said, "Those men I shot. They were my own people. I wanted to give them the whole world."
"Well, who knows? Perhaps that's what you did."
The lieutenant spat suddenly, viciously, as if something unclean had got upon his tongue. He said, "You always have answers which mean nothing."
"I was never any good at books," the priest said. "I haven't any memory. But there was one thing always puzzled me about men like yourself. You hate the rich and love the poor. Isn't that right?"
"Yes."
"Well, if I hated you, I wouldn't want to bring up my child to be like you. It's not sense."
"That's just twisting..."
"Perhaps it is. I've never got your ideas straight. We've always said the poor are blessed and the rich are going to find it hard to get into heaven. Why should we make it hard for the poor man too? Oh, I know we are told to give to the poor, to see they are not hungry - hunger can make a man do evil just as much as money can. But why should we give the poor power? It's better to let him die in dirt and wake in heaven - provided we don't push his face in the dirt."
"I hate your reasons," the lieutenant said. "I don't want reasons. If you see somebody in pain, people like you reason and reason. You say - pain's a good thing, perhaps he'll be better for it one day. I want to let my heart speak."
"At the end of a gun."
"Yes. At the end of a gun."
"Oh well, perhaps when you're my age you'll know the heart's an untrustworthy beast. The mind is too, but it doesn't talk about love. Love. And a girl puts her head under water or a child's strangled, and the heart all the time says love, love."
They lay quiet for a while in the hut. The priest thought the lieutenant was asleep until he spoke again. "You never talk straight. You say one thing to me - but to anther man, or a woman, you say 'God is love'. But you think that stuff won't go down with me, so you say different things. Things you think I'll agree with."
"Oh," the priest said, "that's another thing altogether - God is love. I don't say the heart doesn't feel a taste of it, but what a taste. The smallest glass of love mixed with a pint pot of ditch-water. We wouldn't recognize that love. It might even look like hate. It would be enough to scare us - God's love. It set fire to a bush in the desert, didn't it, and smashed open graves and set the dead walking in the dark. Oh, a man like me would run a mile to get away if he felt that love around."
"You don't trust him much, do you? He doesn't seem a grateful kind of God. If a man served me as well as you've served him, I'd recommend him for a promotion, see he got a good pension...if he was in pain, with cancer, I'd put a bullet through his head."
"Listen," the priest said earnestly, leaning forward in the dark, pressing on a cramped foot, "I'm not as dishonest as you think I am. Why do you think I tell people out of the pulpit that they're in danger of damnation if death catches them unawares? I'm not telling them fairy stories I don't believe myself. I don't know a thing about the mercy of God: I don't know how awful the human heart looks to Him. But I do know this - that if there's ever been a single man in this state damned, then I'll be damned too." He said slowly, "I wouldn't want it to be any different. I just want justice, that's all."