convincingly she was remembered on the edge of the snow-line above
Sulaco. But directly, with a little capable air of setting her wits to
work, she would have found an explanation. "Of course, it was such a
surprise for these boys to find any sort of welcome here. And I suppose
they are homesick. I suppose everybody must be always just a little
homesick."

She was always sorry for homesick people.

Born in the country, as his father before him, spare and tall, with
a flaming moustache, a neat chin, clear blue eyes, auburn hair, and a
thin, fresh, red face, Charles Gould looked like a new arrival from over
the sea. His grandfather had fought in the cause of independence under
Bolivar, in that famous English legion which on the battlefield of
Carabobo had been saluted by the great Liberator as Saviours of his
country. One of Charles Gould's uncles had been the elected President
of that very province of Sulaco (then called a State) in the days of
Federation, and afterwards had been put up against the wall of a church
and shot by the order of the barbarous Unionist general, Guzman Bento.
It was the same Guzman Bento who, becoming later Perpetual President,
famed for his ruthless and cruel tyranny, readied his apotheosis in the
popular legend of a sanguinary land-haunting spectre whose body had been
carried off by the devil in person from the brick mausoleum in the nave
of the Church of Assumption in Sta. Marta. Thus, at least, the priests
explained its disappearance to the barefooted multitude that streamed
in, awestruck, to gaze at the hole in the side of the ugly box of bricks
before the great altar.

Guzman Bento of cruel memory had put to death great numbers of people
besides Charles Gould's uncle; but with a relative martyred in the cause