Nostromo - A Tale of the Seaboard.pdf - Planet eBook

vants with mops of black hair peeped at you from above;the click of billiard balls came to your ears, and ascendingthe steps, you would perhaps see in the first sala, verystiff upon a straight-backed chair, in a good light, Don Pepemoving his long moustaches as he spelt his way, at arm’slength, through an old Sta. Marta newspaper. His horse—astony-hearted but persevering black brute with a hammerhead—you would have seen in the street dozing motionlessunder an immense saddle, with its nose almost touchingthe curbstone of the sidewalk.Don Pepe, when ‘down from the mountain,’ as the phrase,often heard in Sulaco, went, could also be seen in the drawing-roomof the Casa Gould. He sat with modest assuranceat some distance from the tea-table. With his knees closetogether, and a kindly twinkle of drollery in his deep-seteyes, he would throw his small and ironic pleasantries intothe current of conversation. There was in that man a sort ofsane, humorous shrewdness, and a vein of genuine humanityso often found in simple old soldiers of proved couragewho have seen much desperate service. Of course he knewnothing whatever of mining, but his employment was of aspecial kind. He was in charge of the whole population inthe territory of the mine, which extended from the head ofthe gorge to where the cart track from the foot of the mountainenters the plain, crossing a stream over a little woodenbridge painted green—green, the colour of hope, being alsothe colour of the mine.It was reported in Sulaco that up there ‘at the mountain’Don Pepe walked about precipitous paths, girt with a great