Page 432 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

duplicity and cunning, together with bodily strength, were
looked upon, even more than courage, as heroic virtues by
primitive mankind. To overcome your adversary was the
great affair of life. Courage was taken for granted. But the
use of intelligence awakened wonder and respect. Strata-
gems, providing they did not fail, were honourable; the easy
massacre of an unsuspecting enemy evoked no feelings but
those of gladness, pride, and admiration. Not perhaps that
primitive men were more faithless than their descendants
of to-day, but that they went straighter to their aim, and
were more artless in their recognition of success as the only
standard of morality.
We have changed since. The use of intelligence awakens
little wonder and less respect. But the ignorant and barba-
rous plainsmen engaging in civil strife followed willingly a
leader who often managed to deliver their enemies bound,
as it were, into their hands. Pedro Montero had a talent
for lulling his adversaries into a sense of security. And as
men learn wisdom with extreme slowness, and are always
ready to believe promises that flatter their secret hopes, Pe-
dro Montero was successful time after time. Whether only
a servant or some inferior official in the Costaguana Lega-
tion in Paris, he had rushed back to his country directly he
heard that his brother had emerged from the obscurity of
his frontier commandancia. He had managed to deceive by
his gift of plausibility the chiefs of the Ribierist movement
in the capital, and even the acute agent of the San Tome
mine had failed to understand him thoroughly. At once he
had obtained an enormous influence over his brother. They

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