ite peg-top trousers
falling upon strange red boots, kept his head uncovered and stooped
slightly, propping himself up with a thick stick. No! He had earned
enough military glory to satiate any man, he insisted to Mrs. Gould,
trying at the same time to put an air of gallantry into his attitude. A
few jetty hairs hung sparsely from his upper lip, he had a salient nose,
a thin, long jaw, and a black silk patch over one eye. His other eye,
small and deep-set, twinkled erratically in all directions, aimlessly
affable. The few European spectators, all men, who had naturally drifted
into the neighbourhood of the Gould carriage, betrayed by the solemnity
of their faces their impression that the general must have had too much
punch (Swedish punch, imported in bottles by Anzani) at the Amarilla
Club before he had started with his Staff on a furious ride to the
harbour. But Mrs. Gould bent forward, self-possessed, and declared her
conviction that still more glory awaited the general in the near future.

"Senora!" he remonstrated, with great feeling, "in the name of God,
reflect! How can there be any glory for a man like me in overcoming that
bald-headed embustero with the dyed moustaches?"

Pablo Ignacio Barrios, son of a village alcalde, general of division,
commanding in chief the Occidental Military district, did not frequent
the higher society of the town. He preferred the unceremonious
gatherings of men where he could tell jaguar-hunt stories, boast of his
powers with the lasso, with which he could perform extremely difficult
feats of the sort "no married man should attempt," as the saying
goes amongst the llaneros; relate tales of extraordinary night rides,
encounters with wild bulls, struggles with crocodiles, adventures in
the great forests, crossings of swollen rivers. And it was not mere
boastfulness that prompted the general's reminiscences, but a genuine
love of that wild life which he had led in his young days before he
turned his back for ever on the thatched roof of the parental tolderia
in the woods. Wandering away as far as Mexico he had fought against the
French by the side (as he said) of Juarez, and was the only military
man of Costaguana who had ever encountered European troops in the field.
That fact shed a great lustre upon his name till it became eclipsed
by the rising star of Montero. All his life he had been an inveterate
gambler. He alluded himself quite openly to the current story how once,
during som