# Myths and Legends Beyond Our Borders/The Devil in Prison

Layout 2
THE DEVIL IN PRISON
TO Ojinaja, on the Rio Grande, came a Spanish priest in some forgotten year of the eighteenth century, and set up his abode there among the Indians. He taught Christianity, which the people were slow to accept, and he sensibly avoided any attempt to force his religion on them, preferring to show in his own life the advantages that enlightened people enjoyed over savages. In time his good offices had so won their confidence that he gained a sort of chieftaincy among them, yet they clung to their old beliefs and secretly wearied him with their unreasonable superstitions. At length a visitor arrived in Ojinaja who completely changed the aspect of affairs in that village, and converted every Indian to the true faith overnight. That visitor was the devil.
The good father had left his house and gone up the valley for his evening meditations, and had been absent for a couple of hours, when he came running back to the Indians, crying that he had seen the devil, had chased him up the side of a mountain, and had shut him up in a cave on the summit. He had chanced to look up, he told them, and was astonished to see that the valley had been spanned by an immense chain, hung from one mountain to its opposite, and that a fierce-looking creature was seated in the sag of it, swinging in a way to make one's head swim, for he flew a mile back and forth ​at every rise and fall. Realizing that this could be none other than the devil, the priest plucked his cross from a fold of his robe and held it toward the evil one; for there is nothing that so affrights the fiend as the holy cross. And, truly, no sooner had he seen it than, with a howl of dismay, he ceased his sport and scrambled along the chain to one of its holds, tugged at it until the ends gave way, and fled up the height, dragging the two or three hundred tons of iron after him with a prodigious rattling.
The priest was close upon him, still holding the cross on high, when the devil, in a final effort at escape, rushed into the cave, still drawing his chain. As it was disappearing the pursuer touched it with his cross and the last link fell off. Then, with a cry of joy that he had so easily overcome the fiend, he planted the cross at the cave's mouth, thus making him prisoner, if not forever, at least so long as the emblem should be kept whole, and re-placed when it decayed. Yet, to make more sure, he would have the people build a chapel there, and he asked them to follow him to the mountain-top, that they might know his story to be true. Keeping close together, with some fondness for being in the rear, the Ojinajans made the ascent, and were struck into a great trepidation when they heard the undoubted clank of metal within the cave. The priest bade them be of courage, to embrace the faith immediately, and help him to ​erect a shrine before the cavern that should secure them against further evil. This they did, and the chapel still stands on the peak of Ojinaja. The missing link from the devil's chain is preserved there among its relics, and every year, on the night of January 25, the natives climb to the little church, give thanks to God for their preservation, and feed bonfires on both sides of the valley, to express their joy in this escape.