“It’s the ayacuyas that are bothering the girl, and she must be cured of the wounds left by their arrows.”
The old squaw was well acquainted with the ayacuyas, hob-goblins so diminutive that a dozen of them would scarcely cover a finger nail; they always carried bows and arrows, and it was the wounds from these weapons that caused most of the sicknesses in the world.
She herself had never seen them, for she was nothing but a poor ignorant, miserable old woman, but her father, and her grandfather before him, who had been great machis or medicine men, had often had dealings with these little creatures. Only the native Indians could see them. Some of the gringo doctors pretended to have seen them too, and called them by a name in their own language, microbe, but what did they know about them ...?
And if you took their bows and arrows away from them, they attacked human beings with tooth and nail, and it was important to know how, by bleeding and sucking, to get the splinters of the arrows, or the nails and teeth that the invisible demons left in the bodies of their victims, out of the poisoned wounds.
“I’ll find you a machi who’ll make you well, little lady, and take away this sadness that the ayacuyas brought upon you. But don’t let the master know of it.”
Celinda smiled at the remedies suggested by Cachafaz’s mother. When she grew tired of being shut up in the ranch house she went to get her horse and rode him hither and yon over the desert with no goal to reach. She never wore boy’s clothes now. She hated those clothes because of the memories they awoke. She preferred riding in skirts; and she had laid aside too the lassoo that had once been her favorite plaything.
That morning she had been galloping for more than an hour over the ranch when she noticed, on a slight elevation, a rider standing motionless; the distance diminished him to the size of a little tin soldier.
She stopped when she noticed that the miniature rider was plunging down the slope and galloping towards her as though he had recognized her. For some time he was lost to sight, then he reappeared, much bigger in size, on the edge of a deep depression. When she saw that the rider was Watson, her first impulse was to flee. But she repented of this impulse as though it were cowardly, and turning her horse about, remained motionless in a disdainful attitude.
Richard rode up to her, and with his hat in his hand and eyes humbly cast down, he was about to beg pardon. He opened his mouth to speak but the words would not come. Nor did Celinda give him time.
“What do you want?” she asked harshly. “Has your gringa dismissed you? Other people’s leavings aren’t welcome here.”