Mr. Tench encounters a stranger at the port who speaks English and reveals he has brandy.

A child arrives to summon the stranger as a doctor, causing him to miss the only boat out of the territory.

The lieutenant receives orders from his chief to capture the last priest still operating illegally in the territory.

The priest arrives at the Fellows banana plantation seeking shelter and is confronted by the suspicious Captain Fellows.

Coral secretly brings the priest food and beer, and he explains that surrendering to the authorities is not an option.

Villagers at a remote settlement clamor for baptisms and confessions, refusing to let the exhausted priest sleep.

The priest returns to his former parish in Concepción, where police arrive, find no informer among the villagers, and take a hostage.

The priest leaves Concepción bearing guilt after Maria destroys his wine, leaving him unable to perform a proper Mass.

The priest encounters the mestizo on the road and reluctantly accepts his company, suspecting the man intends to betray him.

The priest is arrested in the capital after police hear a brandy bottle clinking beneath his coat as he flees.

The lieutenant fails to recognize the priest and releases him from prison, handing him five pesos.

The priest finds an Indigenous woman guarding a dying child who was shot by the American fugitive.

The mestizo delivers a note from the dying American, and the priest follows him to the hiding place knowing it is a trap.

The lieutenant captures the priest outside the American fugitive's hut after the man dies.

The priest is executed; Mr. Tench recognizes him as the stranger he once shared brandy with and resolves at last to leave Mexico.

The novel follows the whisky priest, the last Catholic clergyman still operating in a Mexican state where religion has been outlawed. He moves from town to village, hearing confessions and saying Mass while barely staying ahead of the lieutenant hunting him. His inability to secure wine for the Eucharist drives him back to his former parish, where the police close in but fail to identify him. After a harrowing passage through the capital, the priest is lured from safety by a dying man's need for last rites, and the lieutenant finally captures him. Tried as a traitor, the priest is executed while scattered bystanders look on, each processing the loss in their own way. Though the priest dies believing himself a failure, a new priest's arrival the same night suggests the struggle he embodied cannot be extinguished.

The whisky priest's flight, capture, and execution.

Mr. Tench finds a book the stranger left behind, opens it to discover Latin text, and quietly hides it.

The lieutenant questions Captain Fellows at the plantation, threatening deportation if Fellows conceals any information about the priest.

Coral questions her mother about God during a school lesson; her mother affirms belief but Coral remains unconvinced.

Padre José walks through the cemetery and refuses a grieving woman's plea to pray over her dead child's burial.

Luis watches soldiers marching past the house with excitement, drawn to their power despite his mother's religious stories.

The lieutenant indulges Luis after the boy throws a bottle at him, allowing the boy to examine his pistol.

The priest dreams of his younger self delivering an ambitious speech at an ordination anniversary dinner, full of pride.

The priest convinces the sick mestizo to ride toward Carmen while he slips away on a separate road.

Padre José refuses to shelter the fleeing priest when the priest runs to his courtyard to escape pursuing police.

In the prison cell, the priest admits he is a clergyman and debates a pious woman who declares him a martyr.

The priest accompanies the Indigenous woman for days to a makeshift graveyard where she lays her child beside a cross.

The Lehrs, German American Protestants, take in the exhausted priest and give him clean clothes and food.

Before leaving with the mestizo, the priest gives all his remaining money to the proprietor to buy food for local children.

Captain Fellows, watching the execution proceed, wonders whether the condemned man is the priest his daughter Coral had befriended.

Luis bends to kiss the hand of a new stranger priest at the door before the man can introduce himself.

Running parallel to the priest's flight is a web of characters whose lives are shaped by the conflict between religious faith and state authority. Mr. Tench finds a suspicious Latin book and hides it, while the lieutenant methodically tightens his net by questioning expatriates and winning small loyalties like young Luis's admiration. Padre José, the married priest, embodies cowardly compromise, refusing to pray over a dead child and later turning away the very man who represents what he abandoned. The priest's own interior journey — a dream of his ambitious younger self, the dispatching of the treacherous mestizo — marks his psychological reckoning with pride and failure. After the execution, scattered figures like Captain Fellows and the family's devout mother process the priest's death in ways that quietly transform him into a martyr. The final image of Luis kissing a new priest's hand confirms that the cycle of faith the authorities tried to break has already renewed itself.

The lives of bystanders and the world surrounding the priest.

Mr. Tench informs the stranger that Lopez, the man he was searching for, was shot weeks ago.

The mother reads her children the martyrdom story of Young Juan as Luis grows restless and dismissive of religious tales.

The lieutenant walks home alone, firmly convinced that life only truly began when the Church was driven from the territory.

The priest hears the ship's horn sounding as it departs without him and feels utterly abandoned.

Brigitta, the priest's illegitimate daughter, is openly insolent and mocking toward him, yet he refuses to repent her existence.

The mestizo hides the mule's saddle during the night to prevent the priest from escaping without him.

The lieutenant releases the priest from prison after the priest falsely claims to be the brother of a man shot in Concepción.

Returning to the Fellows homestead, the priest finds it abandoned in haste, with only a sickly dog and Coral's poetry book remaining.

Feverish and starving, the priest hallucinates and hears a voice saying he has reached their church before collapsing into deep sleep.

The priest hears confession in the Lehrs' barn and is struck by how minor the villagers' sins are compared to his own.

The dying American fugitive refuses to confess his sins and instead urges the priest to take his gun and flee the trap.

The lieutenant and the captive priest hold a long conversation debating faith, the Church's greed, and the hostages shot during the manhunt.

The priest asks the lieutenant to arrange a final confession; the lieutenant personally visits Padre José, who refuses to come.

Unable to secure a confessor, the lieutenant gives the condemned priest a flask of brandy as the execution approaches.

After the execution, Luis spits on the lieutenant's revolver; later that night he dreams of the whisky priest winking at him.

The novel's deeper drama unfolds through a series of decisive moments that reveal who the whisky priest truly is beneath his failures. From the ship he cannot board to the daughter he refuses to disown, each turning point strips away his pretenses and forces him to confront his pride. His false identity fools the lieutenant in the capital but cannot quiet his conscience, and his discovery of the abandoned Fellows homestead signals the full cost his presence exacts on those around him. A feverish collapse near an unnamed church offers an unexpected moment of grace, while the priest's final days bring stark clarity: the American's refusal to confess, a long philosophical reckoning with his captor, and a sleepless night of regret before dawn. The priest dies convinced of his own uselessness, but Luis's contempt for the lieutenant and his dream of the priest winking back suggest the man's life carried far more weight than he ever believed.