ed up to Nostromo with a pair of blazing eyes. He bent low to her in
the saddle.

"Juan," she hissed, "I could stab thee to the heart!"

The dreaded Capataz de Cargadores, magnificent and carelessly public
in his amours, flung his arm round her neck and kissed her spluttering
lips. A murmur went round.

"A knife!" he demanded at large, holding her firmly by the shoulder.

Twenty blades flashed out together in the circle. A young man in holiday
attire, bounding in, thrust one in Nostromo's hand and bounded back into
the ranks, very proud of himself. Nostromo had not even looked at him.

"Stand on my foot," he commanded the girl, who, suddenly subdued, rose
lightly, and when he had her up, encircling her waist, her face near to
his, he pressed the knife into her little hand.

"No, Morenita! You shall not put me to shame," he said. "You shall have
your present; and so that everyone should know who is your lover to-day,
you may cut all the silver buttons off my coat."

There were shouts of laughter and applause at this witty freak, while
the girl passed the keen blade, and the impassive rider jingled in his
palm the increasing hoard of silver buttons. He eased her to the ground
with both her hands full. After whispering for a while with a very
strenuous face, she walked away, staring haughtily, and vanished into
the crowd.

The circle had broken up, and the lordly Capataz de Cargadores, the
indispensable man, the tried and trusty Nostromo, the Mediterranean
sailor come ashore casually to try his luck in Costaguana, rode slowly
towards the harbour. The Juno was just then swinging round; and even
as Nostromo reined up again to look on, a flag ran up on the improvised
flagstaff erected in an ancient and dismantled little fort at the
harbour entrance. Half a battery of field guns had been hurried over
there from the Sulaco barracks for the purpose of firing the regulation
salutes for the President-Dictator and the War Minister. As the
mail-boat headed through the pass, the badly timed reports announced the
end of Don Vincente Ribiera's first official visit to Sulaco, and for
Captain Mitchell the end of another "historic occasion." Next time when
the "Hope of honest men" was to come that way, a year and a half later,
it was unofficially, over the mountain tracks, fleeing after a defeat on
a lame mule, to be only just saved by Nostromo from an ignominious death
at the hands of a mob. It was a very different event, of whic