Page 392 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

tance.’
Captain Mitchell was very nearly provoked to an an-
swer. It displeased him to be liberated insultingly; but want
of sleep, prolonged anxieties, a profound disappointment
with the fatal ending of the silver-saving business weighed
upon his spirits. It was as much as he could do to conceal
his uneasiness, not about himself perhaps, but about things
in general. It occurred to him distinctly that something un-
derhand was going on. As he went out he ignored the doctor
pointedly.
‘A brute!’ said Sotillo, as the door shut.
Dr. Monygham slipped off the window-sill, and, thrust-
ing his hands into the pockets of the long, grey dust coat he
was wearing, made a few steps into the room.
Sotillo got up, too, and, putting himself in the way, ex-
amined him from head to foot.
‘So your countrymen do not confide in you very much,
senor doctor. They do not love you, eh? Why is that, I won-
der?’
The doctor, lifting his head, answered by a long, lifeless
stare and the words, ‘Perhaps because I have lived too long
in Costaguana.’
Sotillo had a gleam of white teeth under the black mous-
tache.
‘Aha! But you love yourself,’ he said, encouragingly.
‘If you leave them alone,’ the doctor said, looking with
the same lifeless stare at Sotillo’s handsome face, ‘they will
betray themselves very soon. Meantime, I may try to make
Don Carlos speak?’

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