Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard
late-colored faces of servants with mops of black hair peeped at you from above; the click of billiard-balls came to your ears, and, ascending the steps, you would perhaps see in the first sala, very stiff upon a straight-backed chair, in a good light, Don Pépé moving his long mustaches as he spelled his way, at arm's-length, through an old Sta. Marta newspaper. His horse—a stony-hearted but persevering black brute with a hammer head—you would have seen in the street, dozing motionless under an immense saddle, with its nose almost touching the curb-stone of the sidewalk.
Don Pépé, when "down from the mountain," as the phrase, often heard in Sulaco, went, could also be seen in the drawing-room of the Casa Gould. He sat with modest assurance at some distance from the tea-table. With his knees close together, and a kindly twinkle of drollery in his deep-set eyes, he would throw his small and ironic pleasantries into the current of conversation. There was in that man a sort of sane, humorous shrewdness, and a vein of genuine humanity so often found in simple old soldiers of proved courage who have seen much desperate service. Of course, he knew nothing whatever of mining, but his employment was of a special kind. He was in charge of the whole population in the territory of the mine, which extended from the head of the gorge to where the cart-track from the foot of the mountain enters the plain, crossing a stream over a little wooden bridge painted green—green, the color of hope, being also the color of the mine.
It was reported in Sulaco that up there "at the mountain" Don Pépé walked about precipitous paths,
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