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Around that time, a letter arrived from Feliciano in Pernambuco with an order for 48,000 réis, equal to ten gold coins. He set aside 12,000 réis for a pair of earrings for his niece and sent the remainder to his brother. He said that he was winding up his affairs so that he could return and rest for good, since he now had enough to live on. He also asked Simeão to keep an eye on one or two estates for sale at thirty or forty thousand cruzados. If any convent properties were still available, Simeão was to try to reserve them until he arrived. 'Forty thousand cruzados, by all the devils!' Simeão exclaimed.
He went to show the letter to Father Master Roque, Trepa of Santo Tirso and the former captain-major of Landim. At the fair he met Pinto Soares, the stout MP who owned the former Benedictine monastery, and asked whether he wished to sell the friars' estates. The narrator presents the MP as living rhetoric, whose sleepy silence was more eloquent than any tongue. Pinto Soares replied that he would not sell, lest he pass on to the buyer the excommunication he had incurred by purchasing Church property. Simeão, unimpressed by Vatican thunderbolts, possessed Franklin's invention within his own stupidity. He therefore went on asking everyone about convents or estates for sale at forty thousand cruzados.
Zeferino das Lamelas considered himself engaged because he had closed the bargain at one conto and a little over five hundred thousand réis. He sought out the farmer to arrange the marriage banns, but Simeão listened with feigned abstraction. Chewing over his words, he said that matters had changed greatly and that his brother was coming to buy estates and convents. He then began unwinding the greasy ribbon around a leather wallet stuffed with papers. It contained tax receipts, a notice to pay the parish stipend, a bill for jet charms against the evil eye and a handwritten prayer against fevers. There was also his old appointment as parish constable, an obsolete military-service exemption and the verses he had recited as a Wise King in a Christmas play. At last, among the greasy little book of Saint Barbara and the other documents, Feliciano's letter appeared, so filthy that it seemed to have been soaked in fat. Simeão insolently asked whether Zeferino had still not heard of that letter as he wetted his fingers to unfold it. He boasted that everyone knew Feliciano was coming from Brazil to buy property.
Zeferino replied that he had heard about it, but that Simeão was breaking his word because of the money. He demanded that the farmer say plainly whether the bargain over the girl was settled or not. 'Men are known by their word and oxen by their horns,' he declared, ordering Simeão to reveal what was inside him. Simeão twisted about, put the letter back in his wallet and answered in mumbled, unfinished phrases. Zeferino translated the hesitation bluntly: Simeão would not give him his daughter. The farmer merely stammered that they must wait and see what his brother said.
Enraged, Zeferino struck a tree stump with the back of his axe and called Simeão a man of bad stock. He invoked Barnabé, Simeão's uncle and a former leader of the robber bands of Serra Negra, as a disgrace to the family. Simeão asked him to mind the way he spoke and not ruin his good name. Zeferino replied that Simeão was a scoundrel incapable of keeping his word in any agreement. He reminded him that six years earlier he had agreed to sell a sow for four coins and had then sold it to António do Eido for an extra quarter-coin. He said that, if Simeão were not old, he would split his head open with the axe. He added sarcastically that Simeão could keep his daughter, for he would find a much better woman at the same price. He went on to insult Marta and her dead mother until Simeão interrupted him to defend his daughter.
Zeferino then declared that, the previous day, he had seen Marta in the Reguengo scrubland talking to the student from Vilalva. He contemptuously mimicked the girl's demure posture and claimed that she had stood there at ease, one hand on her hip, chatting to José. He insisted that the student would never want to marry her and made a coarse gesture with his inflamed eyelid. He wished he could kick them both and vented his rage on stones and the roots of the chestnut trees. As the axe struck sparks from the stones, Simeão began to fear that the scene would end with his own flight.
At that moment, José Dias appeared at the far end of the chestnut grove with a pack of dogs barking at a bristling boar. He called the animals and whistled, making the agreed noise so that Marta would hear him. José had not seen the mason, but the dogs saw him and abandoned the boar to attack an old enemy. At another time, Zeferino would have dismissed the charge, but his hatred of the hunter made him await the pack with his axe raised. José called back the obedient dogs, but Zeferino advanced with his body bent and the weapon gripped in his hairy hands.
'Let them come, and I shall blow the first one's brains into your face,' the mason threatened. José tried to calm him, explaining that the dogs had no other way of speaking. Zeferino challenged both the dogs and their owner, insulting the hunter because he had just seen Marta on the balcony. She was knitting, with the basket of wool hanging from her arm, and her presence made Zeferino still more aggressive. With ominous calm, José warned him to mind his tongue and go on his way. He said that Zeferino should take up the axe against him only when José himself began to bark. Zeferino struck the ground with his axe and asked whether José meant to drive him from that road. The narrator compares Zeferino's love to sour wine that gave him a drunkard's temporary courage. Emboldened by Marta's presence, the mason called José a lump of an ass and challenged him to come closer. José, already yellow with anger, replied that he would put down his gun, wrench the axe from Zeferino's hands and beat him with it.
Zeferino surged towards the hunter with a furious exclamation. At that instant, a dog bred from a cattle dog and a rabbit hound sprang at the seat of the mason's coarse linen trousers. It tugged the cloth until the skin of Zeferino's left buttock was exposed. Zeferino brandished the axe in vain, for its blows cut only the air while the dog leapt aside to attack his other buttock. The rest of the pack joined the first dog, baring threatening teeth and following every movement of the axe with bloodshot eyes. José tried to drive the dogs away by beating them, confirming that he had not ordered the attack.
Marta did not know whether to go down and help her father end the commotion or collapse on the balcony laughing. The torn trousers embarrassed her, but modesty could not withstand the sight. In the heat of the struggle, Zeferino had not felt the exposed skin or remembered that he was wearing no drawers. Only when an extraordinary coolness touched his skin did he put a hand to the spot and discover in himself a remnant of innocent Adam. Marta had already fled the balcony, choking with laughter, and thrown herself face down on the bed, where she rolled and kicked as though suffering from colic. Marta's laughter, although described by the narrator beyond Zeferino's complete knowledge, fixes for the reader the wound that will feed his revenge.
José withdrew, whistling to the pack, which was still growling at the mason's buttocks. Simeão scratched himself with all ten fingernails and offered Zeferino shelter in the mare's stable while he fetched him a pair of trousers. He also suggested that Zeferino hand over the trousers so that four temporary stitches could be put in them. The mason replied with an obscenity so commonplace that Simeão merely told him to go away. He then went indoors like a man afraid of an answer that might be less filthy but more forceful.