Read "The Dust of Conflict" by Harold Bindloss online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
THE red sunrise found the Sin Verguenza already toiling with fierce activity about the hacienda. This was significant, because they were not addicted to unnecessary physical effort, but they had reasons for knowing it was advisable for the men who incurred the displeasure of Morales to take precautions, and the cane that rolled close up to the hacienda would in case of an assault afford convenient cover to the cazadores. It went down crackling before the flashing steel, while the perspiration dripped from swarthy faces, and the men gasped as they toiled. Appleby, who stripped himself to shirt and trousers before an hour had passed, wondered how long his arms, unused to labor, would stand the strain as he strove to keep pace with the men he led. Harper, almost naked, led another band, and stirred up the spirit of rivalry by rude badinage in barbarous Castilian.
It was characteristic that both found the stress of physical effort bracing, and Maccario, attired in hat of costly Panama and spotless duck, watched them with a little twinkle in his dark eyes. There were, he said, sufficient men to do the work without him, and no gentleman of Iberian extraction toiled with his hands unless it was imperatively necessary.