The River
- Singing happily to himself over the motor of his canoe, Captain Fellows returns to his home on the river.
- Entering his bungalow, he receives a cold welcome from his wife, who seems frightened at his arrival, but he doesn't let her worries get him down.
- Captain Fellows asks where their daughter Coral is, his wife says with the police officer, and Captain Fellows, after taking a second to process this unexpected news, has a "wait, what?" moment.
- Before he can go to Coral, she comes to him, wishing to speak to him alone, away from her fearful mother who wants the policeman gone ASAP.
- Coral takes her father to the veranda, where the lieutenant awaits, unwilling to walk to them.
- The lieutenant informs Captain Fellows that he's looking for a priest wanted on treason who's reportedly hiding in the district. He reminds the captain that he's a foreigner living under protection of the country's laws and is therefore expected to return the hospitality. You can feel the tension between the two men. It hardly goes away when the lieutenant departs.
- Coral admits to her father that she wouldn't let the lieutenant search the place. And then she explains why: she's hiding the priest! Talk about trouble with your teenage daughter!
- A happy man no longer, Captain Fellows accompanies Coral to the barn where the priest hides.
- At first, the captain commands the priest to go at once, but then he relents and says he'd better wait until dark when he'd have a better chance to escape.
- The priest refuses offered food, but asks for brandy. The captain finds this begging for brandy shameless, saying "What a religion" (1.3.90).
- After her parents are in bed, Coral brings the priest chicken and Cerveza Moctezuma beer. Her father hears her footsteps, but, despite having forbidding her visiting the barn, he puts her out of his mind. Not one to follow through on his commands, is he?
- Coral advises the priest to head north as the police went south. She asks if he can try to escape from the area. He says he tried, but was summoned and missed his chance. Now he has to continue as a fugitive, doing his duty not to be caught, but preferring being caught to this life on the run. It's a conundrum.
- They talk for a while, about why he feels he cannot renounce the faith, we she lost her faith three years ago at the age of ten, and how Morse code might help him.
- After finishing the chicken and the beer, he leaves.
- Exhausted beyond reason, the priest walks nearly barefoot into a grouping of mud huts. An old man somehow recognizes him as a priest, kissing his hand and taking him to a hut to sleep. They haven't had a priest in five years.
- The priest tries to go to sleep, but the old man, plagued with five years of sin and concerned that a boy hasn't been baptized (the last priest demanded too much money), implores the father to hear his confession.
- The priest says "tomorrow," but the old man, fearful of the soldiers who were just in the area and might return, begs him to hear it now. Angered and tired to the point of tears, the priest nonetheless agrees.
- The old man counsels the other inhabitants to confess as well. Tired as well, they protest, but the old man will not have the priest insulted, telling them that the priest weeps for their sins. Not too perceptive, this one.