Page 588 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

made for himself, under his rightful name, another public
existence, but modified by the new conditions, less pictur-
esque, more difficult to keep up in the increased size and
varied population of Sulaco, the progressive capital of the
Occidental Republic.
Captain Fidanza, unpicturesque, but always a little mys-
terious, was recognized quite sufficiently under the lofty
glass and iron roof of the Sulaco railway station. He took
a local train, and got out in Rincon, where he visited the
widow of the Cargador who had died of his wounds (at the
dawn of the New Era, like Don Jose Avellanos) in the patio
of the Casa Gould. He consented to sit down and drink a
glass of cool lemonade in the hut, while the woman, stand-
ing up, poured a perfect torrent of words to which he did
not listen. He left some money with her, as usual. The or-
phaned children, growing up and well schooled, calling
him uncle, clamoured for his blessing. He gave that, too;
and in the doorway paused for a moment to look at the flat
face of the San Tome mountain with a faint frown. This
slight contraction of his bronzed brow casting a marked
tinge of severity upon his usual unbending expression, was
observed at the Lodge which he attended —but went away
before the banquet. He wore it at the meeting of some good
comrades, Italians and Occidentals, assembled in his hon-
our under the presidency of an indigent, sickly, somewhat
hunchbacked little photographer, with a white face and a
magnanimous soul dyed crimson by a bloodthirsty hate of
all capitalists, oppressors of the two hemispheres. The hero-
ic Giorgio Viola, old revolutionist, would have understood