CHAPTER THREE

It might have been said that there he was only protecting his own. From
the first he had been admitted to live in the intimacy of the family
of the hotel-keeper who was a countryman of his. Old Giorgio Viola,
a Genoese with a shaggy white leonine head--often called simply "the
Garibaldino" (as Mohammedans are called after their prophet)--was, to
use Captain Mitchell's own words, the "respectable married friend" by
whose advice Nostromo had left his ship to try for a run of shore luck
in Costaguana.

The old man, full of scorn for the populace, as your austere republican
so often is, had disregarded the preliminary sounds of trouble. He
went on that day as usual pottering about the "casa" in his slippers,
muttering angrily to himself his contempt of the non-political nature of
the riot, and shrugging his shoulders. In the end he was taken unawares
by the out-rush of the rabble. It was too late then to remove his
family, and, indeed, where could he have run to with the portly Signora
Teresa and two little girls on that great plain? So, barricading every
opening, the old man sat down sternly in the middle of the darkened cafe
with an old shot-gun on his knees. His wife sat on another chair by his
side, muttering pious invocations to all the saints of the calendar.

The old republican did not believe in saints, or in prayers, or in
what he called "priest's religion." Liberty and Garibaldi were his
divinities; but he tolerated "superstition" in women, preserving in
these matters a lofty and silent attitude.