presbytery, they had a game with a pack of greasy cards in the early
evening, before Don Pepe went his last rounds to see that all the
watchmen of the mine--a body organized by himself--were at their posts?
For that last duty before he slept Don Pepe did actually gird his old
sword on the verandah of an unmistakable American white frame house,
which Father Roman called the presbytery. Near by, a long, low, dark
building, steeple-roofed, like a vast barn with a wooden cross over the
gable, was the miners' chapel. There Father Roman said Mass every day
before a sombre altar-piece representing the Resurrection, the grey
slab of the tombstone balanced on one corner, a figure soaring upwards,
long-limbed and livid, in an oval of pallid light, and a helmeted brown
legionary smitten down, right across the bituminous foreground. "This
picture, my children, _muy linda e maravillosa_," Father Roman would say
to some of his flock, "which you behold here through the munificence
of the wife of our Senor Administrador, has been painted in Europe, a
country of saints and miracles, and much greater than our Costaguana."
And he would take a pinch of snuff with unction. But when once an
inquisitive spirit desired to know in what direction this Europe was
situated, whether up or down the coast, Father Roman, to conceal his
perplexity, became very reserved and severe. "No doubt it is extremely
far away. But ignorant sinners like you of the San Tome mine should
think earnestly of everlasting punishment instead of inquiring into the
magnitude of the earth, with its countries and populations altogether
beyond your understanding."

With a "Good-night, Padre," "Good-night, Don Pepe," the Gobernador would
go off, holding up his sabre against his side, his body bent forward,
with a long, plodding stride in the dark. The jocularity proper to an
innocent card game for a few cigars or a bundle of yerba was replaced
at once by the stern duty mood of an officer setting out to visit the