Page 275 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

slaughtered some of the Railway Company’s cattle without
asking leave, and went to work broiling the meat on the em-
bers. Pedrito made many pointed inquiries as to the silver
mine, and what had become of the product of the last six
months’ working. He had said peremptorily, ‘Ask your chief
up there by wire, he ought to know; tell him that Don Pedro
Montero, Chief of the Campo and Minister of the Interior
of the new Government, desires to be correctly informed.’
‘He had his feet wrapped up in blood-stained rags, a lean,
haggard face, ragged beard and hair, and had walked in
limping, with a crooked branch of a tree for a staff. His fol-
lowers were perhaps in a worse plight, but apparently they
had not thrown away their arms, and, at any rate, not all
their ammunition. Their lean faces filled the door and the
windows of the telegraph hut. As it was at the same time
the bedroom of the engineer-in-charge there, Montero had
thrown himself on his clean blankets and lay there shiver-
ing and dictating requisitions to be transmitted by wire to
Sulaco. He demanded a train of cars to be sent down at once
to transport his men up.
‘To this I answered from my end,’ the engineer-in-chief
related to us, ‘that I dared not risk the rolling-stock in the
interior, as there had been attempts to wreck trains all along
the line several times. I did that for your sake, Gould,’ said
the chief engineer. ‘The answer to this was, in the words of
my subordinate, ‘The filthy brute on my bed said, ‘Suppose
I were to have you shot?’’ To which my subordinate, who,
it appears, was himself operating, remarked that it would
not bring the cars up. Upon that, the other, yawning, said,

Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard