Page 113 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

merous Costaguana generals were always anxious to dine
at his house. Presidents granted him audience with facil-
ity. He corresponded actively with his maternal uncle, Don
Jose Avellanos; but his letters—unless those expressing for-
mally his dutiful affection—were seldom entrusted to the
Costaguana Post Office. There the envelopes are opened, in-
discriminately, with the frankness of a brazen and childish
impudence characteristic of some Spanish-American Gov-
ernments. But it must be noted that at about the time of
the re-opening of the San Tome mine the muleteer who had
been employed by Charles Gould in his preliminary travels
on the Campo added his small train of animals to the thin
stream of traffic carried over the mountain passes between
the Sta. Marta upland and the Valley of Sulaco. There are
no travellers by that arduous and unsafe route unless un-
der very exceptional circumstances, and the state of inland
trade did not visibly require additional transport facilities;
but the man seemed to find his account in it. A few pack-
ages were always found for him whenever he took the road.
Very brown and wooden, in goatskin breeches with the hair
outside, he sat near the tail of his own smart mule, his great
hat turned against the sun, an expression of blissful vacan-
cy on his long face, humming day after day a love-song in
a plaintive key, or, without a change of expression, letting
out a yell at his small tropilla in front. A round little guitar
hung high up on his back; and there was a place scooped out
artistically in the wood of one of his pack-saddles where a
tightly rolled piece of paper could be slipped in, the wood-
en plug replaced, and the coarse canvas nailed on again.

11 Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard