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OU'LL never be done laughing at me, Doña Magdalena, because I slept the night of the miracle. I tell you it was the coffee; it put me to sleep like opium. I shouldn't have heard the devil, I tell you, doña, if he'd come hammering at my door that night."

Borromeo Cambon was at his anvil, beating out the parts of one of those plows that turned a furrow like a wave, which Juan Molinero had shown him how to build. He did not take Doña Magdalena's banter with his accustomed good humor, but scowled at her with his dark brows drawn, while he pumped his bellows until it roared like a wintry wind.

"You look as if you'd eat me like a shrimp, Borromeo," she said, pretending to pout in an offended way. "I think it was the brandy instead of the coffee. You are not strong enough to take so much of it at once, poor little man!"

Borromeo slowly took his hand from the bellows shaft, like a deliberate oarsman who feels his craft touch shore, turned to Magdalena with such an expression of injury in his broad face that would have provoked laughter if she had not seen at a