Two tall palms stood like sentinels upon either side of the low step before the doorway. The palm trees were dead. They had been topped by no green plume of leaves since before the death of the old Don Gil. Now, as then, the carpenter birds made their homes in the decaying shaft. The round beak-made holes, from root to treetop, disclosed numberless heads, if so much as a tap were given the resounding stem of the palm.
No one wondered why Don Gil still used the ancient structure as a counting-house. No one ever wondered at anything at Palmacristi; everything was accepted with quiescence. "The good God wills it," a shrug of the shoulders accompanying the remark, made alike, if a tornado unroofed a house or a peon died of the wounds received at the last garito.[2]
The changes which had taken place at Palmacristi had nothing to say to the condition of the counting-house, or it to them, except that it acceded, somewhat slowly in some cases, to the payment of bills. Since his father's day Don Gil had added much to the estate. Upon the right he had bought more than twenty caballerias from Don Luis Salas--land which marched with his own to the seashore. This included a tall headland, with a sand spit at its base, which pushed itself a half mile out into the sea. This sand spit curved in a hook to the left, and formed a pleasant and safe harbour for boating.
To the north of his inheritance Don Gil had taken in the old estates of La Flor and Provedencia, and at the back of the casa, which already stood high up on the slope, he had extended his possessions over the crest of the hill. Had the original owner of Palmacristi returned on a visit to earth, he would have found his old plantation the center of a magnificent estate, with, however, the same shiftless, careless ways of master and servant that had obtained in his time. This would probably grow worse as his descendants succeeded each other in ownership.
The casa was built upon a level, where the hill ceased to be a hill just long enough to allow of a broad foundation for Don Gil's improvements. At the edge of the veranda the hill sloped gently again for the distance of a hundred yards, and then dropped in a short but steep declivity to the sand beach.