Nostromo - A Tale of the Seaboard.pdf - Planet eBook

and years to come. And yet, the day before yesterday, wehave been fighting to save it from the mob, and to-nightI am sent out with it into this darkness, where there is nowind to get away with; as if it were the last lot of silver onearth to get bread for the hungry with. Ha! ha! Well, I amgoing to make it the most famous and desperate affair ofmy life—wind or no wind. It shall be talked about whenthe little children are grown up and the grown men are old.Aha! the Monterists must not get hold of it, I am told, whateverhappens to Nostromo the Capataz; and they shall nothave it, I tell you, since it has been tied for safety roundNostromo’s neck.’‘I see it,’ murmured Decoud. He saw, indeed, that hiscompanion had his own peculiar view of this enterprise.Nostromo interrupted his reflections upon the waymen’s qualities are made use of, without any fundamentalknowledge of their nature, by the proposal they should slipthe long oars out and sweep the lighter in the direction ofthe Isabels. It wouldn’t do for daylight to reveal the treasurefloating within a mile or so of the harbour entrance.The denser the darkness generally, the smarter were thepuffs of wind on which he had reckoned to make his way;but tonight the gulf, under its poncho of clouds, remainedbreathless, as if dead rather than asleep.Don Martin’s soft hands suffered cruelly, tugging at thethick handle of the enormous oar. He stuck to it manfully,setting his teeth. He, too, was in the toils of an imaginativeexistence, and that strange work of pulling a lighter seemedto belong naturally to the inception of a new state, acquired