Summary
A month after Father Latour's visits to Albuquerque and Ácoma, Father Vaillant takes over Father Gallegos' leadership of the Albuquerque parish and institutes more devoted religious practice. In his capacity as Vicar General, Father Vaillant still goes on long travels. After Father Latour dispatches him to Las Vegas, he contracts black measles while tending to a village stricken by the disease. Father Latour visits Jacinto's house and finds that his baby is sick; he hears a legend of Jacinto's Indian tribe, which purports that the tribe must keep snake gods appeased, even by the sacrifice of infants, or else the tribe would face trouble.
Setting out to travel, Father Latour and Jacinto are caught in a snowstorm that forces them to take shelter in a secret cave that Jacinto says is a sacred place to the Indians. He makes Father Latour swear to not tell anyone of what he has seen. When they reach Father Vaillant, they find that Kit Carson has made it there first and has helped nurse the sick priest. Father Latour later asks Carson and Zeb Orchard, a trader, about some of the Pecos Indians' rituals.
Analysis
The narrator takes the occasion of Father Vaillant's falling ill to relate, as is done frequently in the novel, some anecdote from the priest's past in France with his friend Father Latour. Often these flashbacks take place specifically in a character's consciousness, taking the literary form of free indirect speech:
Why, the Bishop was asking himself, had he ever brought his friend to this life of hardship and danger? Father Vaillant had been frail from childhood, though he had the endurance resulting from exhaustless enthusiasm. The Brothers at Montferrand were not given to coddling boys, but every year they used to send this one away for a rest in the high Volvic mountains, because his vitality ran down under the confinement of college life. Twice, while he and Father Latour were missionaries in Ohio, Joseph had been at death’s door; once so ill with cholera that the newspapers had printed his name in the death fist. On that occasion their Ohio Bishop had christened him Trompe-la-Mort. Yes, Father Latour told himself, Blanchet had outwitted death so often, there was always the chance he would do it again (121).
Bracketed by "the Bishop was asking himself" and "Father Latour told himself," the story Father Latour recalls is understood as something that is running through his mind consciously, not just something an impersonal, omniscient narrator is reporting to us.
