Page 198 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

shriek, and Decoud, from his back seat, had a view of the
people behind the carriage trudging along the road outside,
all turning their heads, in sombreros and rebozos, to look at
a locomotive which rolled quickly out of sight behind Gior-
gio Viola’s house, under a white trail of steam that seemed
to vanish in the breathless, hysterically prolonged scream
of warlike triumph. And it was all like a fleeting vision, the
shrieking ghost of a railway engine fleeing across the frame
of the archway, behind the startled movement of the peo-
ple streaming back from a military spectacle with silent
footsteps on the dust of the road. It was a material train re-
turning from the Campo to the palisaded yards. The empty
cars rolled lightly on the single track; there was no rumble
of wheels, no tremor of the ground. The engine-driver, run-
ning past the Casa Viola with the salute of an uplifted arm,
checked his speed smartly before entering the yard; and
when the ear-splitting screech of the steam-whistle for the
brakes had stopped, a series of hard, battering shocks, min-
gled with the clanking of chain-couplings, made a tumult
of blows and shaken fetters under the vault of the gate.

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