ni, Captain Fidanza was seen in
the streets of Sulaco attending to his business, as usual, that trip.
And, as usual, he allowed it to get about that he had made a great
profit on his cargo. It was a cargo of salt fish, and Lent was
approaching. He was seen in tramcars going to and fro between the town
and the harbour; he talked with people in a cafe or two in his measured,
steady voice. Captain Fidanza was seen. The generation that would know
nothing of the famous ride to Cayta was not born yet.

Nostromo, the miscalled Capataz de Cargadores, had made for himself,
under his rightful name, another public existence, but modified by
the new conditions, less picturesque, more difficult to keep up in the
increased size and varied population of Sulaco, the progressive capital
of the Occidental Republic.

Captain Fidanza, unpicturesque, but always a little mysterious, was
recognized quite sufficiently under the lofty glass and iron roof of the
Sulaco railway station. He took a local train, and got out in Rincon,
where he visited the widow of the Cargador who had died of his wounds
(at the dawn of the New Era, like Don Jose Avellanos) in the patio
of the Casa Gould. He consented to sit down and drink a glass of cool
lemonade in the hut, while the woman, standing up, poured a perfect
torrent of words to which he did not listen. He left some money with
her, as usual. The orphaned children, growing up and well schooled,
calling him uncle, clamoured for his blessing. He gave that, too; and in
the doorway paused for a moment to look at the flat face of the San Tome
mountain with a faint frown. This slight contraction of his bronzed brow
casting a marked tinge of severity upon his usual unbending expression,
was observed at the Lodge which he attended--but went away before the
banquet. He wore it at the meeting of some good comrades, Italians
and Occidentals, assembled in his honour under the presidency of an
indigent, sickly, somewhat hunchbacked little photographer, with a white
face and a magnanimous soul dyed crimson by a bloodthirsty hate of
all capitalists, oppressors of the two hemispheres. The heroic Giorgio
Viola, old revolutionist, would have understood nothing of his opening
speech; and Captain Fidanza, lavishly generous as usual to some poor
comrades, made no speech at all. He had listened, frowning, with his
mind far away, and walked off unapproachable, silent, like a man full of
cares.

His frown deepened as, in the