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

sword and in a shabby uniform with tarnished bullion epaulettesof a senior major. Most miners being Indians, withbig wild eyes, addressed him as Taita (father), as these barefootedpeople of Costaguana will address anybody whowears shoes; but it was Basilio, Mr. Gould’s own mozo andthe head servant of the Casa, who, in all good faith andfrom a sense of propriety, announced him once in the solemnwords, ‘El Senor Gobernador has arrived.’Don Jose Avellanos, then in the drawing-room, wasdelighted beyond measure at the aptness of the title, withwhich he greeted the old major banteringly as soon as thelatter’s soldierly figure appeared in the doorway. Don Pepeonly smiled in his long moustaches, as much as to say, ‘Youmight have found a worse name for an old soldier.’And El Senor Gobernador he had remained, with hissmall jokes upon his function and upon his domain, wherehe affirmed with humorous exaggeration to Mrs. Gould—‘No two stones could come together anywhere withoutthe Gobernador hearing the click, senora.’And he would tap his ear with the tip of his forefingerknowingly. Even when the number of the miners alone roseto over six hundred he seemed to know each of them individually,all the innumerable Joses, Manuels, Ignacios, fromthe villages primero—segundo—or tercero (there werethree mining villages) under his government. He could distinguishthem not only by their flat, joyless faces, which toMrs. Gould looked all alike, as if run into the same ancestralmould of suffering and patience, but apparently alsoby the infinitely graduated shades of reddish-brown, of