cial person) to do for him was to remind the supreme
Government--El Gobierno supreme--of a pension (amounting to about a
dollar a month) to which he believed himself entitled. It had been
promised to him, he affirmed, straightening his bent back martially,
"many years ago, for my valour in the wars with the wild Indios when a
young man, senor."

The waterfall existed no longer. The tree-ferns that had luxuriated in
its spray had died around the dried-up pool, and the high ravine was
only a big trench half filled up with the refuse of excavations and
tailings. The torrent, dammed up above, sent its water rushing along
the open flumes of scooped tree trunks striding on trestle-legs to the
turbines working the stamps on the lower plateau--the mesa grande of the
San Tome mountain. Only the memory of the waterfall, with its amazing
fernery, like a hanging garden above the rocks of the gorge, was
preserved in Mrs. Gould's water-colour sketch; she had made it hastily
one day from a cleared patch in the bushes, sitting in the shade of
a roof of straw erected for her on three rough poles under Don Pepe's
direction.

Mrs. Gould had seen it all from the beginning: the clearing of the
wilderness, the making of the road, the cutting of new paths up the
cliff face of San Tome. For weeks together she had lived on the spot
with her husband; and she was so little in Sulaco during that year that
the appearance of the Gould carriage on the Alameda would cause a social
excitement. From the heavy family coaches full of stately senoras and
black-eyed senoritas rolling solemnly in the shaded alley white hands
were waved towards her with animation in a flutter of greetings. Dona
Emilia was "down from the mountain."

But not for long. Dona Emilia would be gone "up to the mountain" in a
day or two, and her sleek carriage mules would have an easy time of
it for another long spell. She had watched the erection of the first
frame-house put up on the lower mesa for an office and Don Pepe's
quarters; she heard with a thrill of thankful emotion the first wagon
load of ore rattle down the then only shoot; she had stood by her
husband's side perfectly silent, and gone cold all over with excitement
at the instant when the first battery of only fifteen stamps was put
in motion for the first time. On the occasion when the fires under the
first set of retorts in their shed had glowed far into the night she did
not retire to rest on the rough cadre set up