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

dark, he ceased rowing and flung the sculls in. The hollowclatter they made in falling was the loudest noise he hadever heard in his life. It was a revelation. It seemed to recallhim from far away, Actually the thought, ‘Perhaps I maysleep to-night,’ passed through his mind. But he did not believeit. He believed in nothing; and he remained sitting onthe thwart.The dawn from behind the mountains put a gleam intohis unwinking eyes. After a clear daybreak the sun appearedsplendidly above the peaks of the range. The greatgulf burst into a glitter all around the boat; and in this gloryof merciless solitude the silence appeared again before him,stretched taut like a dark, thin string.His eyes looked at it while, without haste, he shifted hisseat from the thwart to the gunwale. They looked at it fixedly,while his hand, feeling about his waist, unbuttoned the flapof the leather case, drew the revolver, cocked it, brought itforward pointing at his breast, pulled the trigger, and, withconvulsive force, sent the still-smoking weapon hurtlingthrough the air. His eyes looked at it while he fell forwardand hung with his breast on the gunwale and the fingers ofhis right hand hooked under the thwart. They looked——‘It is done,’ he stammered out, in a sudden flow of blood.His last thought was: ‘I wonder how that Capataz died.’ Thestiffness of the fingers relaxed, and the lover of AntoniaAvellanos rolled overboard without having heard the cordof silence snap in the solitude of the Placid Gulf, whose glitteringsurface remained untroubled by the fall of his body.A victim of the disillusioned weariness which is the retri-