Page:Nostromo (1904).djvu/162

 gigantic cedar-trees—the quarters of the engineer in charge of the advance section.

The harbor was busy, too, with the traffic in railway material, and with the movements of troops along the coast. The O.S.N. Company found much occupation for its fleet. Costaguana had no navy, and, apart from a few coast-guard cutters, there were no national ships except a couple of old merchant steamers used as transports.

Captain Mitchell, feeling more and more in the thick of history, found time for an hour or so during an afternoon in the drawing-room of the Casa Gould, where, with a strange ignorance of the real forces at work around him, he professed himself delighted to get away from the strain of affairs. He did not know what he would have done without his invaluable Nostromo, he declared. Those confounded Costaguana politics gave him more work—he confided to Mrs. Gould—than he had bargained for.

Don José Avellanos had displayed in the service of the endangered Ribiera government an organizing activity and an eloquence of which the echoes reached even Europe. For, after the new loan to the Ribiera government, Europe had become interested in Costaguana. The sala of the Provincial Assembly (in the municipal buildings of Sulaco), with its portraits of the Liberators on the walls and an old flag of Cortez preserved in a glass case above the President's chair, had heard all these speeches—the early one containing the impassioned declaration "Militarism is the enemy," the famous one of the "trembling balance," delivered on the occasion of the vote for the raising of a second