Page 120 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

sword and in a shabby uniform with tarnished bullion ep-
aulettes of a senior major. Most miners being Indians, with
big wild eyes, addressed him as Taita (father), as these bare-
footed people of Costaguana will address anybody who
wears shoes; but it was Basilio, Mr. Gould’s own mozo and
the head servant of the Casa, who, in all good faith and
from a sense of propriety, announced him once in the sol-
emn words, ‘El Senor Gobernador has arrived.’
Don Jose Avellanos, then in the drawing-room, was
delighted beyond measure at the aptness of the title, with
which he greeted the old major banteringly as soon as the
latter’s soldierly figure appeared in the doorway. Don Pepe
only smiled in his long moustaches, as much as to say, ‘You
might have found a worse name for an old soldier.’
And El Senor Gobernador he had remained, with his
small jokes upon his function and upon his domain, where
he affirmed with humorous exaggeration to Mrs. Gould—
‘No two stones could come together anywhere without
the Gobernador hearing the click, senora.’
And he would tap his ear with the tip of his forefinger
knowingly. Even when the number of the miners alone rose
to over six hundred he seemed to know each of them indi-
vidually, all the innumerable Joses, Manuels, Ignacios, from
the villages primero—segundo—or tercero (there were
three mining villages) under his government. He could dis-
tinguish them not only by their flat, joyless faces, which to
Mrs. Gould looked all alike, as if run into the same ances-
tral mould of suffering and patience, but apparently also
by the infinitely graduated shades of reddish-brown, of

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