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Father Osório, the vicar of Caldelas, gave the following account of what happened after Simeão was wounded. In the priest's ironic version, Simeão's brain resisted injuries to his dignity as well as blows to his head. According to him, Simeão was twice fortunate in the head, troubled neither by wounded honour nor by inflammation. The wound healed, and Simeão recovered his appetite. He began eating chickens with a cannibal's hunger and the flesh-loving pleasure of a fox. Marta came to treat the gesture made beside the bed as silent consent to marry her uncle. That did not turn a surrender obtained through fear and guilt into a free wish. In gloomy dejection, she waited for the others to arrange her marriage. When Dona Teresa mentioned the matter, Marta replied, “Do whatever you wish with me.” She added that she no longer knew what she had to live for and that everything was the same to her. Osório admitted that he often thought about the first night of the marriage. He feared that it might bring scandalous quarrels, regret, tears, divorce and shame. Yet Feliciano had repeatedly told him that he had left his village at the age of twelve. He also claimed to have returned as chaste and pure as when he had left. The priest accepted that chastity was a virtue, but associated it with a certain ignorance of anatomy. In his curious reasoning, that inexperience might make Feliciano less attentive to another person's supposed impurity. A false idea of honour sometimes urged him to send Feliciano to speak to the workman from that moonlit night. That man had seen José leave through the window, but could not testify to what he had not observed. Osório reflected, however, that honour and conscience vary greatly from one person to another. He concluded, with irony, that Feliciano's mental and moral condition offered the best guarantee of his own happiness. He asked himself what right he had to spoil so excellent an organism.
Here Osório's account ended, the narrator observed, with all his experience of the customs of rural husbands in Minho.
Simeão, Feliciano's farmer brother, was not very demanding in matters of honour either. He had borne the late Genoveva's infidelities in silence. Now he accepted the damage to his head with the same reserve. The administrator advised him to bring a complaint against Zeferino. He claimed that there was circumstantial testimony capable of serving as evidence. Simeão refused to proceed with the accusation. “Then they really will finish me off,” he said, fearing revenge. The narrator called the caution of that man without primary schooling prophetic.
Meanwhile, Zeferino struggled in the bitterness of a desperate man. Passion made him aggressive, and he talked of smashing half the world to pieces. His father's vice began to take hold of him from within, giving him a burning thirst for port and gin. When he became drunk, he felt profound relief and life seemed better to him. He spent his nights with idlers in taverns where they played esquineta and monte. He put on the table coins acquired during the years when ten years of work had earned him ten thousand cruzados. His gambling companions cheated him. Professional gamblers came from Famalicão to Landim to trap him with marked cards. After his losses, he sank still further into gambling and drink. On those nights, he went to Prazins with a carbine over his shoulder and Tagarro of Monte Córdova beside him. He spoke loudly and arrogantly so that Marta would hear him. Feliciano, the returnee from Brazil, and his brother Simeão were afraid and kept their windows shut after sunset.
News then spread that Feliciano really was going to marry his niece. Zeferino wrote Feliciano an anonymous letter. The letter enlarged upon the workman's account of seeing José Dias climb out of a window. The sighting at the window did not prove what had happened inside the house. At the end, the writer threatened that Feliciano would not enjoy Marta for long if he married her. Feliciano showed the letter to Simeão. The brothers concluded that the stonemason had written it out of passion and rage. It was their conclusion, for the letter bore no signature. Feliciano began to think that the man might carry his revenge through to the end. He feared that Zeferino might beat or kill him. The attacks on his future honour as Marta's husband did not pierce the armour of his conscience. “I know what I am doing,” he said, but the thought of being shot greatly disturbed him. In great secrecy, he told his brother, “We must put an end to this villain.”
Feliciano then thought of his compadre, Joaquim Melro of Pena. Melro was a cross-eyed tavern keeper known by the nickname Alma Negra, the Black Soul. He had warned Feliciano when a Patuleia gang planned to seize him. Later, he had broken with Zeferino over the division of money taken from the Guimarães mailbag. With evident exaggeration, he told his compadre that Zeferino had been as thieving as a rat during the Patuleia. The narrator made no secret of Melro's bad character. He had spent three years at the Relação, implicated as an accomplice in a homicide committed in his tavern. He lived in hardship with his wife and four children. Ever since warning Feliciano, he had never stopped asking him for loans. After the attack on Simeão, Melro secretly claimed that Zeferino had struck the blow. He also said that two thugs from Monte Córdova had guarded Zeferino's back, but the claim was not a reliable identification. Melro boasted that Zeferino would not dare do the same to him or to anyone dear to him.
Feliciano went for a walk towards Pena, where his compadre lived. He told Melro that he wanted to see the Comenda estate, which was for sale, and asked him to show it to him. They talked and, on the way back, stopped before another property, the Cambado house. The house had three windows and a spacious yard. “It is here,” Melro said. Feliciano put on his monocle and read a notice fixed to the door with four tacks. The auction would take place on Sunday at ten in the morning, after Mass. The house would go to the highest bidder above the judicial valuation of 500$000 réis. Feliciano moved away quickly to avoid being seen and muttered words that the account does not reproduce. Melro replied that he wished Heaven were as certain for him as he already considered the house to be.
Feliciano went on to Prazins, and Melro gave his tavern customers a more innocent story. He told them that his compadre was going to buy the Comenda estate. He also said that Feliciano had read the notice for the Cambado house and might buy it for a godson. The customers asked whether the godson was Melro's little boy. “Who else could it be?” he replied, praising Feliciano as a generous man. A mason declared that Feliciano did not even know how rich he was. He said that giving away the house would cost him no more than paying for a small measure of spirits. He added that the palace at Retorta looked like a monastery in its wealth. According to the rumours, Feliciano would live there when he married Marta, and Zeferino was bursting with rage. Melro replied that Zeferino had some reason on his side, since Simeão had promised him Marta. He condemned the broken promise, but held back because Simeão was his compadre's brother and said they could settle it among themselves.
At eight in the evening, after the customers had left, Melro closed the tavern. He looked in to make sure the children were asleep before speaking to his wife. Then he announced, “The Cambado house is ours, but Zeferino must be harvested.” His wife understood that “harvesting” meant killing and raised her hands to her head. “God preserve us! May Our Lady help us!” she exclaimed. Melro ordered her to lower her voice and put a finger to his nose. She begged him to remember the three years spent in prison and their four children. He forbade her to continue and gave her a threatening sideways glare. He fetched an old carbine hidden between the wooden bed and the wall. He sat by the hearth and told his wife to hold the oil lamp. He unloaded the weapon, first removing a wad of moss and then the shot.
His wife wiped her eyes on her shift and insisted, “Joaquim, think what you are about to do.” Melro whistled the hymn of Maria da Fonte while removing the powder and taking parts of the gun apart. In a low voice he sang, “Press onwards, Portuguese people, press onwards without fear.” She implored him, by Christ's wounds, to think of their children. Absorbed in the song, he answered with another verse about holy liberty and triumph or suffering. He blew through the barrel and felt that the air pressure was obstructed by residue. He asked for raw cotton and used a pack needle to clear the touch-hole. “It is dirty,” he said before asking for a little spirit. His wife asked him to come to bed and again begged him not to ruin himself. Melro demanded the spirit, told her to be quiet and began whistling the song of Luisinha. He cleaned the inside of the barrel with cotton soaked in spirit until the last fibres came out white and dry.
Satisfied that the air now passed without obstruction, he hummed, “Now, now, now, Luisinha, now.” He reassembled the carbine, including its two barrel bands and the parts of the breech. He repeatedly tested the cock and the mechanism with his thumb. Then he checked the steel and sharpened the edge of the flint with his knife until it gave off sparks. While his wife wept and invoked the Virgin, he answered with a verse celebrating Queen Luisinha. He ordered her to fetch the cartridges and priming powder from behind the fig basket in the storeroom. Trembling, she handed him the things while calling on the Bom Jesus of Braga and the blessed souls. Melro looked at her sideways and growled another threat to silence her. He loaded the weapon with powder from a cartridge and struck the butt against the floorboards. He made two wads from the paper, one above the powder and the other above the bullet. He repeated the Luisinha song as he finished the preparation. At last, he held the carbine by the trigger guard and aimed at imaginary points with one eye closed.
His wife sat on the floor beside the pallet where three children were crying, and the youngest wailed for her. Alma Negra went inside for a few swallows of spirit and returned wrapped in a military cloak. The cloak was a spoil of the Maria da Fonte fighting. Before leaving, he ordered the kitchen door and garden gate to be left open because he would return through the pine wood. “Go with Our Lady,” his wife said, kneeling before a print of the Bom Jesus to say many Our Fathers.
It was a February night, with dense fog and a black sky of wet mist. Not a branch moved or a blade of grass stirred, and the darkness had the stillness of a catacomb. Among the wet leaves one could hear hares, polecats and foxes approaching the henhouses. Joaquim Melro shuddered and kept his finger on the trigger. The rustle of a wildcat and the distant cry of an owl filled him with fear. Even so, he was going to kill another man: he meant to call him to the window and treacherously shoot him through. That was the plan, although he cursed the darkness and stumbled into thorn bushes.
The narrator imagined that, on such a night, the universe might be the void before creation. Only the trees and stones, felt in the traveller's corns and nose, proved that the world existed. There were village criminals who stole a neighbour's ham, pursued young women or carried murderous guns. If they met no municipal patrols, they met the knotted trunks, which served as God's patrols. Some, protected by the Mephistopheles to whom they had sold their electoral conscience, managed to pass unharmed.
Melro pressed through pine woods and oak groves like a wild boar or a wolf. At times he stopped to find his direction by the crowing of cocks and the barking of dogs. At the foot of the slopes, the River Pele roared at the weirs and small bridges, and Lamelas lay on the other side. As the smaller bridges were impassable, he made for the crossing at Landim. Lights still shone in the grander houses of Landim, where families played bisca at what the narrator mockingly treated as splendid gatherings. The mock luxury of those gatherings consisted of playing sueca with beans.
Argumentative voices could also be heard in Chasco's tavern. There was money inside, for a game of monte was in progress. Melro thought he heard Zeferino's name, crept towards the small window and became convinced that he was inside.
Zeferino was demanding the return of a quartinho that he had staked by the edge of the game. The banker had swept up the coin with the other stakes when the opposing card appeared. Zeferino declared that he would not tolerate cheating. Offended, the banker replied that he would accept no jokes about thieves, since everyone present was a gentleman. Zeferino demanded his quartinho and threatened that otherwise the world would end there and then. He added that anyone who wished to steal should go to Terra Negra. The insult struck former members of the Faísca gang, which exile and force had greatly reduced. A fight broke out with fists and sticks. In the turmoil, knife blades flashed as they sprang open. Tagarro of Monte Córdova dealt the banker an extraordinary punch and sent him face first onto the two halves of the pack. The tavern keeper opened the door to let the mass of fighting men spill out. When they met the darkness outside, the men stopped for a moment, blinded by it. One man, however, remained inside the tavern, leaning against the counter with his hands on his lower abdomen. He cried that they had killed him and, as his knees gave way, fell face down while the tavern keeper and Tagarro tried to hold him. The wounded man was Zeferino. No one identified which participant had stabbed him. Melro did not fire his carbine or take part in that death.
At midnight, Alma Negra entered his house by the garden door. His wife was still kneeling before the print of the Bom Jesus. Two daughters prayed beside her, shivering beneath a torn blanket and warming their hands with their breath. Melro sent the girls to bed and told his pale wife that Zeferino had died without his having contributed to it. She raised her hands joyfully and said that it was a miracle of the Bom Jesus, for she had spent three hours praying. Melro denied the miracle because he thought his compadre would not give him the house if he had not been the one to “harvest” Zeferino. His wife replied that the Devil could take the house and that the Bom Jesus would continue to help them in their rented hut.
The next day, Feliciano heard the account and said, “Well, you get the house, compadre, because you would have killed Zeferino if the others had not killed him, eh?”