Page 322 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

daylight? He began to think that this, after all, was the real
danger. He was afraid that the darkness, which was his pro-
tection, would, in the end, cause his undoing.
Sotillo, as Nostromo had surmised, was in command on
board the transport. The events of the last forty-eight hours
in Sulaco were not known to him; neither was he aware that
the telegraphist in Esmeralda had managed to warn his col-
league in Sulaco. Like a good many officers of the troops
garrisoning the province, Sotillo had been influenced in his
adoption of the Ribierist cause by the belief that it had the
enormous wealth of the Gould Concession on its side. He
had been one of the frequenters of the Casa Gould, where he
had aired his Blanco convictions and his ardour for reform
before Don Jose Avellanos, casting frank, honest glances to-
wards Mrs. Gould and Antonia the while. He was known
to belong to a good family persecuted and impoverished
during the tyranny of Guzman Bento. The opinions he ex-
pressed appeared eminently natural and proper in a man of
his parentage and antecedents. And he was not a deceiver; it
was perfectly natural for him to express elevated sentiments
while his whole faculties were taken up with what seemed
then a solid and practical notion—the notion that the hus-
band of Antonia Avellanos would be, naturally, the intimate
friend of the Gould Concession. He even pointed this out to
Anzani once, when negotiating the sixth or seventh small
loan in the gloomy, damp apartment with enormous iron
bars, behind the principal shop in the whole row under the
Arcades. He hinted to the universal shopkeeper at the ex-
cellent terms he was on with the emancipated senorita, who

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