All that night people from the town below came and went and the quinta resounded to sobs and lamentations, but of all the relatives of the dead and wounded, Dona Isabel took her bereavement hardest. Strange to say, she could not be comforted. She wept, she screamed, she tore her hair, tasting the full nauseousness of the cup her own avarice had prepared. Now, when it was too late, she realized that she had overreached herself, having caused the death of the only two who knew the secret of the treasure. She remembered, also, Sebastian's statement that even the deeds of patent for the land were hidden with the rest, where ten thousand men in ten thousand years could never find them.
Impressed by her manifestations of grief, Esteban's friends reasoned that the widow must have loved her husband dearly. They told one another they had wronged her.