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

with the sergeant’s stripes on the sleeve, and the blood of hiscolonel upon his hands and breast. Three troopers followedhim, of those who had started in pursuit but had ridden onfor liberty. And he told Charles Gould how he and a fewfriends, seeing those soldiers, lay in ambush behind somerocks ready to pull the trigger on them, when he recognizedhis compadre and jumped up from cover, shoutinghis name, because he knew that Hernandez could not havebeen coming back on an errand of injustice and oppression.Those three soldiers, together with the party who lay behindthe rocks, had formed the nucleus of the famous band, andhe, the narrator, had been the favourite lieutenant of Hernandezfor many, many years. He mentioned proudly thatthe officials had put a price upon his head, too; but it did notprevent it getting sprinkled with grey upon his shoulders.And now he had lived long enough to see his compadremade a general.He had a burst of muffled laughter. ‘And now from robberswe have become soldiers. But look, Caballero, at thosewho made us soldiers and him a general! Look at these people!’Ignacio shouted. The light of the carriage lamps, runningalong the nopal hedges that crowned the bank on each side,flashed upon the scared faces of people standing aside in theroad, sunk deep, like an English country lane, into the softsoil of the Campo. They cowered; their eyes glistened verybig for a second; and then the light, running on, fell uponthe half-denuded roots of a big tree, on another stretch ofnopal hedge, caught up another bunch of faces glaring back