Page 116 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

enclosures within the old ramparts, between the black,
lightless cluster of huts, like cow-byres, like dog-kennels.
The horseman hammered with the butt of a heavy revolv-
er at the doors of low pulperias, of obscene lean-to sheds
sloping against the tumble-down piece of a noble wall, at
the wooden sides of dwellings so flimsy that the sound of
snores and sleepy mutters within could be heard in the
pauses of the thundering clatter of his blows. He called out
men’s names menacingly from the saddle, once, twice. The
drowsy answers—grumpy, conciliating, savage, jocular, or
deprecating—came out into the silent darkness in which
the horseman sat still, and presently a dark figure would
flit out coughing in the still air. Sometimes a low-toned
woman cried through the window-hole softly, ‘He’s coming
directly, senor,’ and the horseman waited silent on a mo-
tionless horse. But if perchance he had to dismount, then,
after a while, from the door of that hovel or of that pulperia,
with a ferocious scuffle and stifled imprecations, a cargador
would fly out head first and hands abroad, to sprawl under
the forelegs of the silver-grey mare, who only pricked for-
ward her sharp little ears. She was used to that work; and
the man, picking himself up, would walk away hastily from
Nostromo’s revolver, reeling a little along the street and
snarling low curses. At sunrise Captain Mitchell, coming
out anxiously in his night attire on to the wooden balcony
running the whole length of the O.S.N. Company’s lonely
building by the shore, would see the lighters already under
way, figures moving busily about the cargo cranes, perhaps
hear the invaluable Nostromo, now dismounted and in the

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