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

do?’ ‘You know very well I was, and in chains, too,’ says he.‘And under a fine of fifteen thousand dollars?’ He coloured,sir, because it got about that he fainted from fright whenthey came to arrest him, and then behaved before Fuentesin a manner to make the very policianos, who had draggedhim there by the hair of his head, smile at his cringing. ‘Yes,’he says, in a sort of shy way. ‘Why?’ ‘Oh, nothing. You stoodto lose a tidy bit,’ says I, ‘even if you saved your life…. Butwhat can I do for you?’ He never even saw the point. Not he.And that’s how the world wags, sir.’He rose a little stiffly, and the drive to Rincon would betaken with only one philosophical remark, uttered by themerciless cicerone, with his eyes fixed upon the lights ofSan Tome, that seemed suspended in the dark night betweenearth and heaven.‘A great power, this, for good and evil, sir. A great power.’And the dinner of the Mirliflores would be eaten, excellentas to cooking, and leaving upon the traveller’s mindan impression that there were in Sulaco many pleasant,able young men with salaries apparently too large for theirdiscretion, and amongst them a few, mostly Anglo-Saxon,skilled in the art of, as the saying is, ‘taking a rise’ out ofhis kind host.With a rapid, jingling drive to the harbour in a twowheeledmachine (which Captain Mitchell called a curricle)behind a fleet and scraggy mule beaten all the time by anobviously Neapolitan driver, the cycle would be nearlyclosed before the lighted-up offices of the O. S. N. Company,