uard, was lying drunk and asleep in the bosom of his family.
His bare feet were upturned in the shadows repulsively, in the manner
of a corpse. His eloquent mouth had dropped open. His youngest daughter,
scratching her head with one hand, with the other waved a green bough
over his scorched and peeling face.

CHAPTER SIX

The declining sun had shifted the shadows from west to east amongst the
houses of the town. It had shifted them upon the whole extent of the
immense Campo, with the white walls of its haciendas on the knolls
dominating the green distances; with its grass-thatched ranches
crouching in the folds of ground by the banks of streams; with the dark
islands of clustered trees on a clear sea of grass, and the precipitous
range of the Cordillera, immense and motionless, emerging from the
billows of the lower forests like the barren coast of a land of giants.
The sunset rays striking the snow-slope of Higuerota from afar gave it
an air of rosy youth, while the serrated mass of distant peaks remained
black, as if calcined in the fiery radiance. The undulating surface of
the forests seemed powdered with pale gold dust; and away there, beyond
Rincon, hidden from the town by two wooded spurs, the rocks of the
San Tome gorge, with the flat wall of the mountain itself crowned by
gigantic ferns, took on warm tones of brown and yellow, with red rusty
streaks, and the dark green clumps of bushes rooted in crevices. From
the plain the stamp sheds and the houses of the mine appeared dark and
small, high up, like the nests of birds clustered on the ledges of a
cliff. The zigzag paths resembled faint tracings scratched on the wall
of a cyclopean blockhouse. To the two serenos of the mine on patrol
duty, strolling, carbine in hand, and watchful eyes, in the shade of the
trees lining the stream near the bridge, Don Pepe, descending the path
from the upper plateau, appeared no bigger than a large beetle.

With his air of aimless, insect-like going to and fro upon the face of
the rock, Don Pepe's figure kept on descending steadily, and, when near
the bottom, sank at last behind the roofs of store-houses, forges, and
workshops. For a time the pair of serenos strolled back and forth before
the bridge, on which they had stopped a horseman holding a large white
envelope in his hand. Then Don Pepe, emerging in the village street
from amongst the houses, not a stone's throw from the frontier bridge,
approached, striding in wide d