Page 391 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

Sotillo, ensconced in the vast armchair, remarked, ‘I
should have thought that the feelings of a caballero would
have dictated to you an appropriate reply.’
He waited for it, but Captain Mitchell remaining mute,
more from extreme resentment than from reasoned inten-
tion, Sotillo hesitated, glanced towards the doctor, who
looked up and nodded, then went on with a slight effort—
‘Here, Senor Mitchell, is your watch. Learn how hasty and
unjust has been your judgment of my patriotic soldiers.’
Lying back in his seat, he extended his arm over the
table and pushed the watch away slightly. Captain Mitch-
ell walked up with undisguised eagerness, put it to his ear,
then slipped it into his pocket coolly.
Sotillo seemed to overcome an immense reluctance.
Again he looked aside at the doctor, who stared at him un-
winkingly.
But as Captain Mitchell was turning away, without as
much as a nod or a glance, he hastened to say—
‘You may go and wait downstairs for the senor doctor,
whom I am going to liberate, too. You foreigners are insig-
nificant, to my mind.’
He forced a slight, discordant laugh out of himself, while
Captain Mitchell, for the first time, looked at him with
some interest.
‘The law shall take note later on of your transgressions,’
Sotillo hurried on. ‘But as for me, you can live free, un-
guarded, unobserved. Do you hear, Senor Mitchell? You
may depart to your affairs. You are beneath my notice. My
attention is claimed by matters of the very highest impor-

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