Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard
with each man's load resting above his head on the top of the low mud wall, slept stretched in a row within the strip of shade.
The heavy stone-work of bridges and churches left by the conquerors proclaimed the disregard of human labor, the tribute-labor of vanished nations. The power of king and church was gone, but at the sight of some heavy ruinous pile overtopping from a knoll the low mud walls of a village, Don Pépé would interrupt the tale of his campaigns to exclaim:
"Poor Costaguana! Before, it was everything for the padres, nothing for the people; and now it is everything for these great politicos in Sta. Marta, for negroes and thieves."
Charles talked with the alcaldes, with the fiscales, with the principal people in towns, and with the caballeros on the estates. The commandantes of the districts offered him escorts—for he could show an authorization from the Sulaco political chief of the day. How much the document had cost him in gold twenty-dollar pieces was a secret between himself, a great man in the United States (who condescended to answer the Sulaco mail with his own hand), and a great man of another sort, with a dark olive complexion and shifty eyes, inhabiting then the palace of the Intendencia in Sulaco, and who piqued himself on his culture and Europeanism generally in a rather French style because he had lived in Europe for some years—in exile, he said. However, it was pretty well known that just before this exile he had incautiously gambled away all the cash in the custom-house of a small port where a friend in power had procured for him the
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