THROUGH good and evil report in the varying fortune of that struggle which Don Jose had characterized in the phrase, “the fate of national honesty trembles in the balance,” the Gould Concession¹, “Imperium in Imperio,” had gone on working; the square mountain had gone on pouring its treasure down the wooden shoots to the unresting batteries of stamps; the lights of San Tome had twinkled night after night upon the great, limitless shadow of the Campo; every three months the silver escort had gone down to the sea as if neither the war nor its consequences could ever affect the ancient Occidental State secluded² beyond its high barrier of the Cordillera. All the fighting took place on the other side of that mighty³ wall of serrated peaks lorded over by the white dome⁴ of Higuerota and as yet unbreached by the railway, of which only the first part, the easy Campo part from Sulaco to the Ivie Valley at the foot of the pass, had been laid. Neither did the telegraph line cross the mountains yet; its poles, like slender beacons⁵ on the plain, penetrated⁶ into the forest fringe of the foot-hills cut by the deep avenue of the track; and its wire ended abruptly⁷ in the construction camp at a white deal table supporting a Morse apparatus⁸, in a long hut of planks⁹ with a corrugated¹⁰ iron roof overshadowed by gigantic cedar¹¹ trees — the quarters of the engineer in charge of the advance section.

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