peyne d'oro girls in the more remote
side-streets of the town. But he, too, was a discreet man.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Those of us whom business or curiosity took to Sulaco in these years
before the first advent of the railway can remember the steadying effect
of the San Tome mine upon the life of that remote province. The outward
appearances had not changed then as they have changed since, as I am
told, with cable cars running along the streets of the Constitution, and
carriage roads far into the country, to Rincon and other villages, where
the foreign merchants and the Ricos generally have their modern villas,
and a vast railway goods yard by the harbour, which has a quay-side, a
long range of warehouses, and quite serious, organized labour troubles
of its own.

Nobody had ever heard of labour troubles then. The Cargadores of the
port formed, indeed, an unruly brotherhood of all sorts of scum, with
a patron saint of their own. They went on strike regularly (every
bull-fight day), a form of trouble that even Nostromo at the height of
his prestige could never cope with efficiently; but the morning after
each fiesta, before the Indian market-women had opened their mat
parasols on the plaza, when the snows of Higuerota gleamed pale over
the town on a yet black sky, the appearance of a phantom-like horseman
mounted on a silver-grey mare solved the problem of labour without fail.
His steed paced the lanes of the slums and the weed-grown enclosures
within the old ramparts, between the black, lightless cluster of huts,
like cow-byres, like dog-kennels. The horseman hammered with the butt of
a heavy revolver at the doors of low pulperias, of obscene lean-to sheds
sloping against the tumble-down piece of a noble wall, at the wooden
sides of dwellings so flimsy that the sound of snores and sleepy mutters
within could be heard in the pauses of the thundering clatter of his
blows. He called out men's names menacingly from the saddle, once,
twice. The drowsy answers--grumpy, conciliating, savage, jocular, or
deprecating--came out into the silent darkness in which the horseman sat
still, and presently a dark figure would flit out coughing in the still
air. Sometimes a low-toned woman cried through the window-hole softly,
"He's coming directly, senor," and the horseman waited silent on a
motionless horse. But if perchance he had to dismount, then, after a
while, from the door of that hovel or of that pulperia, with a ferocious
scuff