The heavy stonework of bridges and churches left by the conquerors
proclaimed the disregard of human labour, the tribute-labour of vanished
nations. The power of king and church was gone, but at the sight of
some heavy ruinous pile overtopping from a knoll the low mud walls of a
village, Don Pepe would interrupt the tale of his campaigns to exclaim--

"Poor Costaguana! Before, it was everything for the Padres, nothing for
the people; and now it is everything for those great politicos in Sta.
Marta, for negroes and thieves."

Charles talked with the alcaldes, with the fiscales, with the
principal people in towns, and with the caballeros on the estates. The
commandantes of the districts offered him escorts--for he could show an
authorization from the Sulaco political chief of the day. How much the
document had cost him in gold twenty-dollar pieces was a secret between
himself, a great man in the United States (who condescended to answer
the Sulaco mail with his own hand), and a great man of another sort,
with a dark olive complexion and shifty eyes, inhabiting then the Palace
of the Intendencia in Sulaco, and who piqued himself on his culture and
Europeanism generally in a rather French style because he had lived in
Europe for some years--in exile, he said. However, it was pretty well
known that just before this exile he had incautiously gambled away all
the cash in the Custom House of a small port where a friend in power had
procured for him the post of subcollector. That youthful indiscretion
had, amongst other inconveniences, obliged him to earn his living for a
time as a cafe waiter in Madrid; but his talents must have been great,
after all, since they had enabled him to retrieve his political
fortunes so splendidly. Charles Gould, exposing his business with an
imperturbable steadiness, called him Excellency.