When she recovered, the chorus sounded directly above her, and the chant seemed to soar away like voices from an upper world.  She glanced up the dark fissure as through a flume.  The cross-beams were faintly visible.  Over the cleft rested a moonlit sky, but to the rocks clung the figure of a man.  That man stood there a moment only, then shouting a few words as if calling to somebody within, he disappeared.  The song was hushed.  Say recognized the speaker; it was Tyope, Shotaye’s former husband, and the one whom the woman suspected of having done her harm.  Resolutely she went at her task.

Taking a bundle of owl’s feathers from her wrap, she presented it successively to the six regions, and then buried it carefully in the sand, below where the first cross-beam traversed the fissure.  Again she listened and spied, and creeping forward concealed the second bunch in another place near by.  Then she whispered the sinister prayer which was to give to the feathers the power to do harm.  At the close the drum rumbled again within the cliffs above her, and the chant rose strong and rude.  Covering her head, shaking and shivering with sudden fear, Say Koitza rushed from the spot.  Ere day broke she had reached home again, and extended her weary frame by the side of her sleeping children.

Say slept for the remainder of the night a long sleep of exhaustion.  The next morning her first task was to bury the last bunch of owl’s feathers in the kitchen, close to the fireplace, where it was to protect her from the inroads of enemies.  She felt weak but rather comfortable.  Her only anxiety was now the return of her husband.

Zashue came home at last, good-humoured as ever, but with a lively appetite akin to hunger.  His wife received him in a subdued manner bordering on obsequiousness; she was more than ever bent on anticipating any desire on his part.  All the while afraid of detection, every kind word spoken to her caused remorse, every joke pained her in secret.  It recalled what she had done to his companions, perhaps to him also.

The incantations of the chayani and the fasts of the Koshare seemed to have no effect whatever upon the course of the rain-clouds.  The heavens clouded regularly every day; they shed their moisture all around the Tyuonyi, but not a drop fell in the valley-gorge.  Now the three chief penitents of the tribe, the Hotshanyi, the shaykatze, and the uishtyaka, were called upon to use their means of intercession with Those Above.  They fasted, prayed, and made sacrifices alternately for an entire moon; still it rained not.  In New Mexico local droughts are sometimes very pertinacious.  Plants withered, the corn and beans suffered, languished, and died.  The tribe looked forward to a winter without vegetable food.  But Say Koitza was secretly glad, for drought killed her disease.  She felt stronger every day, and worked zealously, anxious to please her husband and to remove every suspicion.  Shotaye called on her frequently; she, too, felt proud of the success of her cure, sure of the revenge she had taken upon her enemies.