Page 410 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

had planned revolutions, who had believed in revolutions.
For all the uprightness of his character, he had something
of an adventurer’s easy morality which takes count of per-
sonal risk in the ethical appraising of his action. He was
prepared, if need be, to blow up the whole San Tome moun-
tain sky high out of the territory of the Republic. This
resolution expressed the tenacity of his character, the re-
morse of that subtle conjugal infidelity through which his
wife was no longer the sole mistress of his thoughts, some-
thing of his father’s imaginative weakness, and something,
too, of the spirit of a buccaneer throwing a lighted match
into the magazine rather than surrender his ship.
Down below in the patio the wounded Cargador had
breathed his last. The woman cried out once, and her cry,
unexpected and shrill, made all the wounded sit up. The
practicante scrambled to his feet, and, guitar in hand, gazed
steadily in her direction with elevated eyebrows. The two
girls—sitting now one on each side of their wounded rel-
ative, with their knees drawn up and long cigars between
their lips—nodded at each other significantly.
Charles Gould, looking down over the balustrade, saw
three men dressed ceremoniously in black frock-coats with
white shirts, and wearing European round hats, enter the
patio from the street. One of them, head and shoulders
taller than the two others, advanced with marked gravity,
leading the way. This was Don Juste Lopez, accompanied
by two of his friends, members of Assembly, coming to call
upon the Administrador of the San Tome mine at this early
hour. They saw him, too, waved their hands to him urgently,

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