Page 402 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

with the sergeant’s stripes on the sleeve, and the blood of his
colonel upon his hands and breast. Three troopers followed
him, of those who had started in pursuit but had ridden on
for liberty. And he told Charles Gould how he and a few
friends, seeing those soldiers, lay in ambush behind some
rocks ready to pull the trigger on them, when he recog-
nized his compadre and jumped up from cover, shouting
his name, because he knew that Hernandez could not have
been coming back on an errand of injustice and oppression.
Those three soldiers, together with the party who lay behind
the rocks, had formed the nucleus of the famous band, and
he, the narrator, had been the favourite lieutenant of Her-
nandez for many, many years. He mentioned proudly that
the officials had put a price upon his head, too; but it did not
prevent it getting sprinkled with grey upon his shoulders.
And now he had lived long enough to see his compadre
made a general.
He had a burst of muffled laughter. ‘And now from rob-
bers we have become soldiers. But look, Caballero, at those
who made us soldiers and him a general! Look at these peo-
ple!’
Ignacio shouted. The light of the carriage lamps, running
along the nopal hedges that crowned the bank on each side,
flashed upon the scared faces of people standing aside in the
road, sunk deep, like an English country lane, into the soft
soil of the Campo. They cowered; their eyes glistened very
big for a second; and then the light, running on, fell upon
the half-denuded roots of a big tree, on another stretch of
nopal hedge, caught up another bunch of faces glaring back

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