They informed the chief engineer; they informed the minister. Neither of them would listen to the complaint. They were too sensible and too learned to believe in the evil eye. The workmen ought to mind better what they were about. It was their own fault that they met with accidents.
And the gravel-cars tipped over; the locomotive exploded.
One morning there was a rumor that the engineer was gone. He had disappeared; no one knew what had become of him. Had some one perhaps stabbed him? Oh, no; oh, no! would any one have dared to kill a jettatore?
But he was really gone; no one ever saw him again.
It was a few years later that Donna Micaela began to think of building her railway. And in order to get money for it, she wished to hold a bazaar in the great Franciscan monastery outside Diamante.
There was a cloister garden there, surrounded by splendid old pillars. Donna Micaela arranged little booths, little lotteries, and little places of diversion under the arcades. She hung festoons of Venetian lanterns from pillar to pillar. She piled up great kegs of Etna wine around the cloister fountain.
While Donna Micaela worked there she often conversed with little Gandolfo, who had been made watchman at the monastery since Fra Felice’s death.
One day she made Gandolfo show her the whole monastery. She went through it all from attic to cellar, and when she saw those countless little cells with their grated windows and whitewashed walls and hard wooden seats, she had an idea.
She asked Gandolfo to shut her in in one of the cells and to leave her there for the space of five minutes.