Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard
steady voice. Captain Fidanza was seen. The generation that would know nothing of the famous ride to 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 José 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, clamored for his blessing. He gave that, too; and in the doorway paused for a moment to look at the flat face of the San Tomé 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 attended—but went away before the banquet. He wore it at the meeting of some good comrades, Italians and Occidentals, assembled in his honor under the presidency of an indigent, sickly, somewhat hunch-backed little photographer, with a white face, and a
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