round you, Dona Emilia--meek as lambs, patient
like their own burros, brave like lions. I have led them to the very
muzzles of guns--I, who stand here before you, senora--in the time of
Paez, who was full of generosity, and in courage only approached by the
uncle of Don Carlos here, as far as I know. No wonder there are bandits
in the Campo when there are none but thieves, swindlers, and sanguinary
macaques to rule us in Sta. Marta. However, all the same, a bandit is a
bandit, and we shall have a dozen good straight Winchesters to ride with
the silver down to Sulaco."

Mrs. Gould's ride with the first silver escort to Sulaco was the closing
episode of what she called "my camp life" before she had settled in her
town-house permanently, as was proper and even necessary for the wife of
the administrator of such an important institution as the San Tome mine.
For the San Tome mine was to become an institution, a rallying point
for everything in the province that needed order and stability to live.
Security seemed to flow upon this land from the mountain-gorge. The
authorities of Sulaco had learned that the San Tome mine could make it
worth their while to leave things and people alone. This was the nearest
approach to the rule of common-sense and justice Charles Gould felt it
possible to secure at first. In fact, the mine, with its organization,
its population growing fiercely attached to their position of privileged
safety, with its armoury, with its Don Pepe, with its armed body of
serenos (where, it was said, many an outlaw and deserter--and even some
members of Hernandez's band--had found a place), the mine was a power in
the land. As a certain prominent man in Sta. Marta had exclaimed with
a hollow laugh, once, when discussing the line of action taken by the
Sulaco authorities at a time of political crisis--

"You call these men Government officials? They? Never! They are
officials of the mine--officials of the Concession--I tell you."

The prominent man (who was then a person in power, with a lemon-coloured
face and a very short and curly, not to say woolly, head of hair) went
so far in his temporary discontent as to shake his yellow fist under the
nose of his interlocutor, and shriek--

"Yes! All! Silence! All! I tell you! The political Gefe, the chief of
the police, the chief of the customs, the general, all, all, are the
officials of that Gould."

Thereupon an intrepid but low and argumentative murmur would flow