A red cloth on a rock caught her eye. She snatched it up and clenched it to her heart. It was the head-kerchief of Jacinto Quesada. When but lately he had sat and gloomed on that boulder above the pool, he had dropped it from his pocket and gone off unawares.
She replaced the red headcloth upon the boulder. It lay there in a crumpled crimson heap, and it pulsed a little as its folds eased out. It looked like a dying heart.
From some recess in her bosom, the girl Paquita drew forth a small moleskin sack on a string and shook its contents out upon the top of the rock. There was a looking-glass, smaller than the palm of her small brown hand. There was a flint and a bit of steel. There was a chunk of lodestone, the magnetic iron-ore which the Gypsies of Spain call La Bar Lachi and which they claim is possessed of a thousand magical and miraculous properties. There were, also, a half dozen other uncouth Rommany charms and talismans.
She propped the hand-glass upright against the crumpled head-kerchief. She fell to her knees before it. With an unwavering and strangely intense gaze, with a stark contemplation, she stared into the eyes reflected from the mirror.
Five minutes, then ten snailed painfully by. The process of self-hypnosis went on. She was like one transfixed by a hooded cobra. Her body grew gradually rigid, and her breathing ever deeper and slower. At last she seemed not to breathe at all. Her eyes vacant and numbly fixed, she rose slowly to her feet.
She crossed the tiny beach of clean white sand. She stooped with a fluent graceful flexure at the brim of the pool, filled her hands with wet sand, and slowly pressed and molded that wet sand into an uncouth little image of a man.
The diminutive effigy she deposited upon the beach, setting it upright on its vaguely defined and overbroad feet. A second time, she stooped at the water's edge, filled her hands with sand, and again packed and shaped that wet sand into a squat little figure. Only this time the effigy bore a crude but easily perceived resemblance to a woman.
She deposited the one image on the beach beside the other. She gathered dry leaves and scraps of tinder-rot and made two little piles of them, each before a tiny figurine. She returned to the boulder, swathed the lodestone in the red headcloth and, lodestone and cloth in hand, bore them back across the beach. And everything was done with extreme slowness, with acute and painful deliberation. She was like a somnambulist in a walking sleep.
She fetched the flint and the steel from the boulder. She could execute, it seemed, only one errand at a time. She dropped to her knees above one of the tiny piles of dry leaves and tinder-rot, and busied herself with the flint and steel. So soon as the one leafy hillock commenced to burn bravely, she translated its flame. The other little bonfire cackled with a like eagerness and gusto.
Stepping back from her uncouth little idols and tiny sacrificial fires, she undid a catch here and another catch there, and her shoulders and then her hips emerged from the green gown, and the gown fell in a swishing billow about her brown bare feet. Clad only in her olive-pale, satin-smooth and satin-glowing skin, she stepped out of the atoll of green cloth and commenced a slow and strange dance there upon the sands.