PART SECOND THE ISABELS
CHAPTER ONE
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 Concession, "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 secluded
beyond its high barrier of the Cordillera. All the fighting took place
on the other side of that mighty wall of serrated peaks lorded over by
the white dome 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 beacons on the
plain, penetrated into the forest fringe of the foot-hills cut by
the deep avenue of the track; and its wire ended abruptly in the
construction camp at a white deal table supporting a Morse apparatus,
in a long hut of planks with a corrugated iron roof overshadowed by
gigantic cedar trees--the quarters of the engineer in charge of the
advance section.
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