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have made it perfectly safe. So far, she, too, was under the spell of
that reputation the Capataz de Cargadores had made for himself by
the waterside, along the railway line, with the English and with the
populace of Sulaco. To his face, and even against her husband, she
invariably affected to laugh it to scorn, sometimes good-naturedly,
more often with a curious bitterness. But then women are unreasonable in
their opinions, as Giorgio used to remark calmly on fitting occasions.
On this occasion, with his gun held at ready before him, he stooped down
to his wife's head, and, keeping his eyes steadfastly on the barricaded
door, he breathed out into her ear that Nostromo would have been
powerless to help. What could two men shut up in a house do against
twenty or more bent upon setting fire to the roof? Gian' Battista was
thinking of the casa all the time, he was sure.

"He think of the casa! He!" gasped Signora Viola, crazily. She struck
her breast with her open hands. "I know him. He thinks of nobody but
himself."

A discharge of firearms near by made her throw her head back and close
her eyes. Old Giorgio set his teeth hard under his white moustache, and
his eyes began to roll fiercely. Several bullets struck the end of the
wall together; pieces of plaster could be heard falling outside; a voice
screamed "Here they come!" and after a moment of uneasy silence there
was a rush of running feet along the front.

Then the tension of old Giorgio's attitude relaxed, and a smile of
contemptuous relief came upon his lips of an old fighter with a leonine
face. These were not a people striving for justice, but thieves. Even to
defend his life against them was a sort of degradation for a man who had
been one of Garibaldi's immortal thousand in the conquest of Sicily. He
had an immense scorn for this outbreak of scoundrels and leperos, who
did not know the meaning of the word "liberty."

He grounded his old gun, and, turning his head, glanced at the coloured
lithograph of Garibaldi in a black frame on the white wall; a thread
of strong sunshine cut it perpendicularly. His eyes, accustomed to the
luminous twilight, made out the high colouring of the face, the red of
the shirt, the outlines of the square shoulders, the black patch of the
Bersagliere hat with cock's feathers curling over the crown. An immortal
hero! This was your liberty; it gave you not only life, but immortality
as well!

For that one man his fanaticism had suffered no diminution. In the
moment of relief from the apprehension of the greatest danger, perhaps,
his family had been exposed to in all their wanderings, he had turned to
the picture of his old chief, first and only, then laid his hand on his
wife's shoulder.

The children kneeling on the floor had not moved. Signora Teresa opened
her eyes a little, as though he had awakened her from a very deep and
dreamless slumber. Before he had time in his deliberate way to say a
reassuring word she jumped up, with the children clinging to her, one on

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