Page 119 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

vants with mops of black hair peeped at you from above;
the click of billiard balls came to your ears, and ascend-
ing the steps, you would perhaps see in the first sala, very
stiff upon a straight-backed chair, in a good light, Don Pepe
moving his long moustaches as he spelt his way, at arm’s
length, through an old Sta. Marta newspaper. His horse—a
stony-hearted but persevering black brute with a hammer
head—you would have seen in the street dozing motionless
under an immense saddle, with its nose almost touching
the 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 draw-
ing-room of the Casa Gould. He sat with modest assurance
at some distance from the tea-table. With his knees close
together, and a kindly twinkle of drollery in his deep-set
eyes, he would throw his small and ironic pleasantries into
the current of conversation. There was in that man a sort of
sane, humorous shrewdness, and a vein of genuine human-
ity so often found in simple old soldiers of proved courage
who have seen much desperate service. Of course he knew
nothing whatever of mining, but his employment was of a
special kind. He was in charge of the whole population in
the territory of the mine, which extended from the head of
the gorge to where the cart track from the foot of the moun-
tain enters the plain, crossing a stream over a little wooden
bridge painted green—green, the colour of hope, being also
the 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

11 Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard