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

had planned revolutions, who had believed in revolutions.For all the uprightness of his character, he had somethingof an adventurer’s easy morality which takes count of personalrisk in the ethical appraising of his action. He wasprepared, if need be, to blow up the whole San Tome mountainsky high out of the territory of the Republic. Thisresolution expressed the tenacity of his character, the remorseof that subtle conjugal infidelity through which hiswife was no longer the sole mistress of his thoughts, somethingof his father’s imaginative weakness, and something,too, of the spirit of a buccaneer throwing a lighted matchinto the magazine rather than surrender his ship.Down below in the patio the wounded Cargador hadbreathed his last. The woman cried out once, and her cry,unexpected and shrill, made all the wounded sit up. Thepracticante scrambled to his feet, and, guitar in hand, gazedsteadily in her direction with elevated eyebrows. The twogirls—sitting now one on each side of their wounded relative,with their knees drawn up and long cigars betweentheir lips—nodded at each other significantly.Charles Gould, looking down over the balustrade, sawthree men dressed ceremoniously in black frock-coats withwhite shirts, and wearing European round hats, enter thepatio from the street. One of them, head and shoulderstaller than the two others, advanced with marked gravity,leading the way. This was Don Juste Lopez, accompaniedby two of his friends, members of Assembly, coming to callupon the Administrador of the San Tome mine at this earlyhour. They saw him, too, waved their hands to him urgently,