Page 388 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

friend’s character is not my idea of fun, if it were to fool the
greatest blackguard on earth.’
Had it not been for Captain Mitchell’s depression, caused
by the fatal news, his disgust of Dr. Monygham would have
taken a more outspoken shape; but he thought to himself
that now it really did not matter what that man, whom he
had never liked, would say and do.
‘I wonder,’ he grumbled, ‘why they have shut us up to-
gether, or why Sotillo should have shut you up at all, since it
seems to me you have been fairly chummy up there?’
‘Yes, I wonder,’ said the doctor grimly.
Captain Mitchell’s heart was so heavy that he would
have preferred for the time being a complete solitude to
the best of company. But any company would have been
preferable to the doctor’s, at whom he had always looked
askance as a sort of beachcomber of superior intelligence
partly reclaimed from his abased state. That feeling led him
to ask—
‘What has that ruffian done with the other two?’
‘The chief engineer he would have let go in any case,’ said
the doctor. ‘He wouldn’t like to have a quarrel with the rail-
way upon his hands. Not just yet, at any rate. I don’t think,
Captain Mitchell, that you understand exactly what Sotil-
lo’s position is—‘
‘I don’t see why I should bother my head about it,’ snarled
Captain Mitchell.
‘No,’ assented the doctor, with the same grim composure.
‘I don’t see why you should. It wouldn’t help a single human
being in the world if you thought ever so hard upon any