Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard
shriven many simple souls on the battle-fields of the republic, kneeling by the dying on hill-sides, in the long grass, in the gloom of the forests, to hear the last confession with the smell of gunpowder smoke in his nostrils, the rattle of muskets, the hum and spatter of bullets in his ears. And where was the harm if, at the presbytery, they had a game with a pack of greasy cards in the early evening, before Don Pépé went his last rounds to see that all the watchmen of the mine—a body organized by himself—were at their posts? For that last duty before he slept Don Pépé did actually gird his old sword on the veranda of an unmistakable American white frame house, which Father Roman called the presbytery. Near by, a long, low, dark building, steeple-roofed, like a vast barn, with a wooden cross over the gable, was the miners' chapel. There Father Roman said mass every day before a sombre altar-piece representing the Resurrection, the gray slab of the tombstone balanced on one corner, a figure soaring upward, long-limbed and livid, in an oval of pallid light, and a helmeted brown legionary smitten down, right across the bituminous foreground "This picture, my children, muy linda e maravillosa," Father Roman would say to some of his flock, "which you behold here through the munificence of the wife of our Señor Administrador, has been painted in Europe, a country of saints and miracles, and much greater than our Costaguana." And he would take a pinch of snuff with unction. But when once an inquisitive spirit desired to know in what direction this Europe was situated, whether up or down the coast, Father Roman, to conceal his
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