Ramon Baca's Attack on the Girls' Dormitory

Ramon Baca's attack on the girls' dormitory interrupts Elinora St. Clair's attempted escape and places Lizzy Enders and the baby in immediate danger. The scene overturns the romance Elinora expects from her nighttime departure: the figure entering through the window is not Abeyta but Delvina's violent husband, searching for his child. Lizzy's response shifts the encounter from terror and helplessness to physical resistance, while the broken statue she uses makes the rescue both startling and costly.

Background and mistaken arrival

Elinora is at the window to elope with Abeyta. Lizzy watches her struggle to raise the large sash, initially thrilled by the romantic quality of the plan; the danger that follows is not what she anticipates. When Elinora manages to open the window, the wind rushes into the room, tosses the curtains about, and knocks a vase of flowers from a nearby dresser. That abrupt disorder announces the change in the scene before the intruder's identity is clear.

Ramon bounds into the room, becomes entangled in the curtains, grabs Elinora, and tumbles to the floor with her. He has a large knife and demands to know where his baby is. The mismatch between his purpose and his first target is central to the attack: in the scarce moonlight, Ramon first thinks Elinora may be the woman he seeks, then realizes she is not. He identifies Lizzy instead as the girl who sits with the baby in the courtyard every day. Elinora, meanwhile, demands to know what he has done to Abeyta, unaware at first that the man who has burst into their room is not her intended escape partner.

The assault in the dormitory

Ramon pulls Elinora to her feet and accuses her of not being the person he came for. Once he sees Lizzy in bed, he starts toward her. Elinora catches his arm and presses him about Abeyta. Ramon flings her aside, but she grabs his leg and holds on as he advances across the room. Her resistance delays him, but it does not end the threat: he turns toward her with the knife raised.

Lizzy has been groping among the covers, frightened and slow to act. The sight of Ramon poised to stab Elinora makes her move. She leaps from the bed, accidentally dumping Cleo onto the floor, and grabs the nearest solid object she can use as a weapon. Lizzy later distinguishes her motive: she acts less for Elinora than for Elena. That recognition gives the blow its particular force in the scene. The baby’s vulnerability, rather than the romance interrupted at the window, is what finally cuts through Lizzy's fear.

In the darkness, Lizzy cannot see clearly what she has picked up. She grips it with both hands and swings with all her strength, striking Ramon on the head and sending him reeling. The object is the bottom half of a statue of the Virgin Mary, the part that stood on the serpent. The attack has thus turned an object of devotion into an improvised means of defense; its use saves time, but shatters the statue, leaving the upper half in blue and cream-colored pieces across the floor.

Intervention and immediate outcome

The bedroom door opens as Ramon reels. Mother Magdalena stands there with the other nuns, who have come in their nightcaps and nightdresses. Their arrival reveals the room's disorder all at once: the open window, curtains still whipping in the wind, Elinora fully dressed beside her portmanteau, and Ramon slumped on the floor with his knife still in his hand and blood on his head. Lizzy is left holding the statue's lower half amid the scattered fragments of its upper half.

The scene's danger is checked, but the details make clear how close it came to worsening. Elinora had already been thrown down and had clung to Ramon's leg; Lizzy struck only when he raised the knife against her. The nuns' entrance brings witnesses and help into the room at the moment when Lizzy's blow has made intervention possible. The account does not describe the precise handling of Ramon after they arrive; it establishes that the assault has stopped and that the authorities later take charge of him.

Public account and significance

At Mass on Wednesday morning, the Bishop addresses the congregation after announcing that the carpenter will resume work on the chapel stairway. He says that Saint Joseph did not come that week as many had believed he would, and warns against treating that disappointment as evidence that God has abandoned them. He also gives thanks for the safety of two girls attacked in their room the previous evening, adding that the attacker has been taken in hand by magistrates and is in the town jail.

The Bishop's brief public account places the attack among the morning's other concerns: the stairway's unfinished work, the congregation's expectations of Saint Joseph, and the funeral of Mrs. Lacey. The contrast is sharp. In the bedroom, danger is encountered through a knife, a falling body, and a desperate blow; at Mass, it is recounted as the survival of two girls and the custody of their attacker. The scene's decisive turn belongs to Lizzy's physical choice to act, made not as an abstract display of courage but in response to the danger facing Elena.