brazen as to disarm the hatred of a man courageous enough
not to be afraid of its irresponsible potency to ruin everything it touched. It
seemed to him too contemptible for hot anger even. He made use of it with a
cold, fearless scorn, manifested rather than concealed by the forms of stony
courtesy which did away with much of the ignominy of the situation. At bottom,
perhaps, he suffered from it, for he was not a man of cowardly illusions, but he
refused to discuss the ethical view with his wife. He trusted that, though a
little disenchanted, she would be intelligent enough to understand that his
character safeguarded the enterprise of their lives as much or more than his
policy. The extraordinary development of the mine had put a great power into his
hands. To feel that prosperity always at the mercy of unintelligent greed had
grown irksome to him. To Mrs. Gould it was humiliating. At any rate, it was
dangerous. In the confidential communications passing between Charles Gould, the
King of Sulaco, and the head of the silver and steel interests far away in
California, the conviction was growing that any attempt made by men of education
and integrity ought to be discreetly supported. »You may tell your friend
Avellanos that I think so,« Mr. Holroyd had written at the proper moment from
his inviolable sanctuary within the eleven-storey high factory of great affairs.
And shortly afterwards, with a credit opened by the Third Southern Bank (located
next door but one to the Holroyd Building), the Ribierist party in Costaguana
took a practical shape under the eye of the administrator of the San Tomé mine.
And Don José, the hereditary friend of the Gould family, could say: »Perhaps, my
dear Carlos, I shall not have believed in vain.«
 

                                  Chapter Two

After another armed struggle, decided by Montero's victory of Rio Seco, had been
added to the tale of civil wars, the honest men, as Don José called them, could
breathe freely for the first time in half a century. The Five-Year-Mandate law
became the basis of that regeneration, the passionate desire and hope for which
had been like the elixir of everlasting youth for Don José Avellanos.
    And when it was suddenly - and not quite unexpectedly - endangered by that
brute Montero, it was a passionate indignation that gave him a new lease of
life, as it were. Already, at the time of the President-Dictator's visit to
Sulaco, Moraga had sounded a note of warning from Sta. Marta about the War
Minister. Montero and his brother made