Page 234 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

so.’ And now he was going. It was impossible to do business
in explosives with an Administrador so well provided and
so discouraging. He had suffered agonies in the saddle and
had exposed himself to the atrocities of the bandit Hernan-
dez for nothing at all. Neither hides nor dynamite—and the
very shoulders of the enterprising Israelite expressed de-
jection. At the door he bowed low to the engineer-in-chief.
But at the bottom of the stairs in the patio he stopped short,
with his podgy hand over his lips in an attitude of medita-
tive astonishment.
‘What does he want to keep so much dynamite for?’ he
muttered. ‘And why does he talk like this to me?’
The engineer-in-chief, looking in at the door of the emp-
ty sala, whence the political tide had ebbed out to the last
insignificant drop, nodded familiarly to the master of the
house, standing motionless like a tall beacon amongst the
deserted shoals of furniture.
‘Good-night, I am going. Got my bike downstairs. The
railway will know where to go for dynamite should we get
short at any time. We have done cutting and chopping for a
while now. We shall begin soon to blast our way through.’
‘Don’t come to me,’ said Charles Gould, with perfect se-
renity. ‘I shan’t have an ounce to spare for anybody. Not an
ounce. Not for my own brother, if I had a brother, and he
were the engineer-in-chief of the most promising railway
in the world.’
‘What’s that?’ asked the engineer-in-chief, with equa-
nimity. ‘Unkindness?’
‘No,’ said Charles Gould, stolidly. ‘Policy.’