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uniform with tarnished bullion epaulettes of a senior major. Most miners
being Indians, with big wild eyes, addressed him as Taita (father), as
these barefooted people of Costaguana will address anybody who wears
shoes; but it was Basilio, Mr. Gould's own mozo and the head servant
of the Casa, who, in all good faith and from a sense of propriety,
announced him once in the solemn words, "El Senor Gobernador has
arrived."
Don Jose Avellanos, then in the drawing-room, was delighted beyond
measure at the aptness of the title, with which he greeted the old major
banteringly as soon as the latter's soldierly figure appeared in the
doorway. Don Pepe only smiled in his long moustaches, as much as to say,
"You might have found a worse name for an old soldier."
And El Senor Gobernador he had remained, with his small jokes upon
his function and upon his domain, where he affirmed with humorous
exaggeration to Mrs. Gould--
"No two stones could come together anywhere without the Gobernador
hearing the click, senora."
And he would tap his ear with the tip of his forefinger knowingly. Even
when the number of the miners alone rose to over six hundred he seemed
to know each of them individually, all the innumerable Joses, Manuels,
Ignacios, from the villages _primero--segundo--or tercero_ (there were
three mining villages) under his government. He could distinguish them
not only by their flat, joyless faces, which to Mrs. Gould looked
all alike, as if run into the same ancestral mould of suffering and
patience, but apparently also by the infinitely graduated shades of
reddish-brown, of blackish-brown, of coppery-brown backs, as the two
shifts, stripped to linen drawers and leather skull-caps, mingled
together with a confusion of naked limbs, of shouldered picks, swinging
lamps, in a great shuffle of sandalled feet on the open plateau before
the entrance of the main tunnel. It was a time of pause. The Indian
boys leaned idly against the long line of little cradle wagons standing
empty; the screeners and ore-breakers squatted on their heels smoking
long cigars; the great wooden shoots slanting over the edge of the
tunnel plateau were silent; and only the ceaseless, violent rush of
water in the open flumes could be heard, murmuring fiercely, with the
splash and rumble of revolving turbine-wheels, and the thudding march
of the stamps pounding to powder the treasure rock on the plateau below.
The heads of gangs, distinguished by brass medals hanging on their bare
breasts, marshalled their squads; and at last the mountain would swallow
one-half of the silent crowd, while the other half would move off in
long files down the zigzag paths leading to the bottom of the gorge.
It was deep; and, far below, a thread of vegetation winding between the
blazing rock faces resembled a slender green cord, in which three lumpy
knots of banana patches, palm-leaf roots, and shady trees marked the
Village One, Village Two, Village Three, housing the miners of the Gould
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