Page 431 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

off close to the shoulder for greater freedom in throwing
the lazo. Emaciated greybeards rode by the side of lean dark
youths, marked by all the hardships of campaigning, with
strips of raw beef twined round the crowns of their hats,
and huge iron spurs fastened to their naked heels. Those
that in the passes of the mountain had lost their lances had
provided themselves with the goads used by the Campo cat-
tlemen: slender shafts of palm fully ten feet long, with a lot
of loose rings jingling under the ironshod point. They were
armed with knives and revolvers. A haggard fearlessness
characterized the expression of all these sun-blacked coun-
tenances; they glared down haughtily with their scorched
eyes at the crowd, or, blinking upwards insolently, pointed
out to each other some particular head amongst the women
at the windows. When they had ridden into the Plaza and
caught sight of the equestrian statue of the King dazzlingly
white in the sunshine, towering enormous and motionless
above the surges of the crowd, with its eternal gesture of
saluting, a murmur of surprise ran through their ranks.
‘What is that saint in the big hat?’ they asked each other.
They were a good sample of the cavalry of the plains
with which Pedro Montero had helped so much the victori-
ous career of his brother the general. The influence which
that man, brought up in coast towns, acquired in a short
time over the plainsmen of the Republic can be ascribed
only to a genius for treachery of so effective a kind that it
must have appeared to those violent men but little removed
from a state of utter savagery, as the perfection of sagac-
ity and virtue. The popular lore of all nations testifies that

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