popular lore of all nations testifies that duplicity and
cunning, together with bodily strength, were looked upon, even more than
courage, as heroic virtues by primitive mankind. To overcome your adversary was
the great affair of life. Courage was taken for granted. But the use of
intelligence awakened wonder and respect. Stratagems, providing they did not
fail, were honourable; the easy massacre of an unsuspecting enemy evoked no
feelings but those of gladness, pride, and admiration. Not perhaps that
primitive men were more faithless than their descendants of to-day, but that
they went straighter to their aim, and were more artless in their recognition of
success as the only standard of morality.
    We have changed since. The use of intelligence awakens little wonder and
less respect. But the ignorant and barbarous plainsmen engaging in civil strife
followed willingly a leader who often managed to deliver their enemies bound, as
it were, into their hands. Pedro Montero had a talent for lulling his
adversaries into a sense of security. And as men learn wisdom with extreme
slowness, and are always ready to believe promises that flatter their secret
hopes, Pedro Montero was successful time after time. Whether only a servant or
some inferior official in the Costaguana Legation in Paris, he had rushed back
to his country directly he heard that his brother had emerged from the obscurity
of his frontier commandancia. He had managed to deceive by his gift of
plausibility the chiefs of the Ribierist movement in the capital, and even the
acute agent of the San Tomé mine had failed to understand him thoroughly. At
once he had obtained an enormous influence over his brother. They were very much
alike in appearance, both bald, with bunches of crisp hair above their ears,
arguing the presence of some negro blood. Only Pedro was smaller than the
general, more delicate altogether, with an ape-like faculty for imitating all
the outward signs of refinement and distinction, and with a parrot-like talent
for languages. Both brothers had received some elementary instruction by the
munificence of a great European traveller, to whom their father had been a
body-servant during his journeys in the interior of the country. In General
Montero's case it enabled him to rise from the ranks. Pedrito, the younger,
incorrigibly lazy and slovenly, had drifted aimlessly from one coast town to
another, hanging about counting-houses, attaching himself to strangers as a sort
of valet-de-place, picking up an easy and disreputable living. His ability to
read did nothing for him but fill his head with absurd visions. His actions were
usually determined by motives so