Toward evening Raquel grew more quiet, and Ana, seeing that the fever was abating, gave herself much blame for sending in such haste for Rafael; and what she had written to him only the good saints could tell, for she had been so frightened she had possibly told him unpleasant things! However, all things could be endured if only Raquel would open her eyes in reason once more, and lift the load of self-blame from the heart of Ana. Not only the young girls, but the mistress as well, kept a respectful distance from the room where Raquel lay, adjoining the hall. Her moans and strange words had filled them with dread, but no more so than had the grovelling fear of the old Indian woman. All day she had crouched at the door like a patient animal, waiting the end. Sometimes she muttered to herself in queer Indian words, sometimes she crept to the couch of Dona Raquel for a little while, and then back again to the door, always mumbling or praying, and always insisting that the mother of Raquel had come from the grave to tell things, and that the last of the kings was gone now for always! Any attempt at a question, any interpretation of her mutterings, would arouse her to a realization that she was among new people in a strange land, and her lips would shut in a straight line, to be kept shut so long as she was conscious of their presence. The Indian servants crept past the door, with fearful eyes fixed in dread. She was of another race and another tongue than their own forebears, straight and slender even in her old age; darkest reddish-bronze in color, while a San Juan grandmother was always fat, and nearly always black. Beside them, Polonia looked almost Caucasian. Yet she proudly denied any white blood; she was an Indian of a hill tribe of the south, the name of which she would not utter. All this, and her mutterings, and the wild words of her mistress, put terror into the heart of the San Joaquin household. The girls huddled together and whispered tales of witches and ghosts, and thought she looked like each in turn; and Dona Ana got great credit for courage in staying in the room with her in the night-time. But all their vague fears were changed to a definite terror when one of the Indian children found the clay image by the aquia, and in its yet moist members all the pins, for the stealing of which half the children around the ranch had that morning received a taste of the rope's end. Such a gray-faced, wailing lot as scampered up from the aquia! Girls screaming, old women wailing, and the mothers herding the children out of reach of the accursed thing!