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them had run out in the corredor to ask the servant wheth-
er something to eat couldn’t be sent in. The first words the
engineer-in-chief said as he came into the boudoir were,
‘What is your house, dear Mrs. Gould? A war hospital be-
low, and apparently a restaurant above. I saw them carrying
trays full of good things into the sala.’
‘And here, in this boudoir,’ I said, ‘you behold the inner
cabinet of the Occidental Republic that is to be.’
‘He was so preoccupied that he didn’t smile at that, he
didn’t even look surprised.
‘He told us that he was attending to the general disposi-
tions for the defence of the railway property at the railway
yards when he was sent for to go into the railway telegraph
office. The engineer of the railhead, at the foot of the moun-
tains, wanted to talk to him from his end of the wire. There
was nobody in the office but himself and the operator of the
railway telegraph, who read off the clicks aloud as the tape
coiled its length upon the floor. And the purport of that talk,
clicked nervously from a wooden shed in the depths of the
forests, had informed the chief that President Ribiera had
been, or was being, pursued. This was news, indeed, to all
of us in Sulaco. Ribiera himself, when rescued, revived, and
soothed by us, had been inclined to think that he had not
been pursued.
‘Ribiera had yielded to the urgent solicitations of his
friends, and had left the headquarters of his discomfited
army alone, under the guidance of Bonifacio, the mule-
teer, who had been willing to take the responsibility with
the risk. He had departed at daybreak of the third day. His

Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard