Page 300 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

and years to come. And yet, the day before yesterday, we
have been fighting to save it from the mob, and to-night
I am sent out with it into this darkness, where there is no
wind to get away with; as if it were the last lot of silver on
earth to get bread for the hungry with. Ha! ha! Well, I am
going to make it the most famous and desperate affair of
my life—wind or no wind. It shall be talked about when
the little children are grown up and the grown men are old.
Aha! the Monterists must not get hold of it, I am told, what-
ever happens to Nostromo the Capataz; and they shall not
have it, I tell you, since it has been tied for safety round
Nostromo’s neck.’
‘I see it,’ murmured Decoud. He saw, indeed, that his
companion had his own peculiar view of this enterprise.
Nostromo interrupted his reflections upon the way
men’s qualities are made use of, without any fundamental
knowledge of their nature, by the proposal they should slip
the long oars out and sweep the lighter in the direction of
the Isabels. It wouldn’t do for daylight to reveal the trea-
sure floating within a mile or so of the harbour entrance.
The denser the darkness generally, the smarter were the
puffs of wind on which he had reckoned to make his way;
but tonight the gulf, under its poncho of clouds, remained
breathless, as if dead rather than asleep.
Don Martin’s soft hands suffered cruelly, tugging at the
thick handle of the enormous oar. He stuck to it manfully,
setting his teeth. He, too, was in the toils of an imaginative
existence, and that strange work of pulling a lighter seemed
to belong naturally to the inception of a new state, acquired