For a moment he saw it as the mirror of his dream, cracking and splitting; then, as the image of the Virgin tilted itself forward from its shrine and fell with a crash, he dropped the shutter, and running to the door, tugged at its heavy wooden bolt. The hut was collapsing, and he must escape into the open air.
He neither screamed nor shouted, for his terror throttled him; and after the first rushing noise the wall bowed inwards silently, with but a trickle of dry and loosened mud. His gaze, cast back across his shoulder, was on it while he tugged at the bolt. Slowly—very slowly, the roof sank, and stayed itself, held up on either hand by its two corner-props. Then, while it came to a standstill, sagging between them, the wall beneath it burst asunder, St. Joseph and St. James were flung head-over-heels after the Virgin, and through the rent poured a broad river of silver.
He faced around gradually, holding his breath. His back was to the door now, and he leaned against it with outspread palms while his eyes devoured the miracle.
Dollars! Silver dollars!
He could not lift his gaze from them. If he did, they would surely vanish, and he awake from his dream. Yet in the very shock of awe, and starving though he was, the master-habit of his life, the secretive peasant cunning, had already begun to work. Never once relaxing his fixed stare, fearful even of blinking with his smoke-sored eyes, he shuffled sideways toward the window-hole, his hands groping the wall behind him. The wooden shutter and its fastening bar—a short oak pole—lay where he had dropped them, on the floor beneath the window. He crouched, feeling backwards for them; found, lifted them on to the inner ledge, and, with a half-turn of his body, thrust one arm deep into the recess and jammed the shutter into its place. To fix the bolt was less easy; it fitted across the back of the shutter, its ends resting in two sockets pierced in the wall of the recess. He could use but one hand; yet in less than a minute he found the first socket, slid an end of the bolt into it as far as it would go, lifted the other end and scraped with it along the opposite side of the recess until it dropped into the second socket. He was safe now—safe from prying eyes. In all this while—these two, perhaps three, minutes—his uppermost terror had been lest strange eyes were peering in through the window-hole: it had cost him anguish not to remove his own for an instant from the miracle to assure himself. But he had shut out this terror now: and the miracle had not vanished.
A few coins trickled yet. He crawled forward across the floor, crouching like a beast for a spring. But as he drew close his old legs began to shake under him. He dropped on his knees and fell forward, plunging both hands into the bright pile.
Dollars! real silver dollars!
He lay on the flood of wealth, stretched like a swimmer, his fingers feebly moving among the coins which slid and poured over the back of his hands. He did not ask how the miracle had befallen. He was starving; dying in fact, though he did not know it; and lo! he had found a heaven beyond all imagination, and lay in it and panted, at rest. The firelight played on the heave and fall of his gaunt shoulder-blades, and on the glass eyes of the Virgin, whose head had rolled half-way across the floor and lay staring up foolishly at the rafters.
"Mother, open! Ah, open quickly, mother, for the love of God!"