Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard
cotton shirts had been cut off close to the shoulder for greater freedom in throwing the lazo. Emaciated graybeards rode by the side of lean, dark youths, marked by all the hardships of campaigning, with scrips of raw beef twined round the crowns of their hats and huge iron spurs fastened to their naked heels. Those that in the passes of the mountain had lost their lances had provided themselves with the goads used by the Campo cattlemen—slender shafts of palm fully ten feet long, with a lot of loose rings jingling under the iron-shod point. They were armed with knives and revolvers. A haggard fearlessness characterized the expression of all these sun-blacked countenances; they glared down haughtily with their scorched eyes at the crowd, or, blinking upward insolently, pointed out to each other some particular head among the women at the windows. When they had ridden into the Plaza and caught sight of the equestrian statue of the king dazzlingly white in the sunshine, towering enormous and motionless above the surges of the crowd, with its eternal gesture of saluting, a murmur of surprise ran through their ranks. "What is that saint in the big hat?" they asked each other.
They were a good sample of the cavalry of the plains with which Pedro Montero had helped so much the victorious career of his brother the general. The influence which that man, brought up in coast towns, acquired in a short time over the plainsmen of the republic can be ascribed only to a genius for treachery of so effective a kind that it must have appeared to those violent men, but little removed from a state of utter savagery, as the perfection of sagacity and
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