Page 539 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

that would know how to succeed. He was that man, sir. On
the fifth of May, being practically a prisoner in the Harbour
Office of my Company, I suddenly heard the whistle of an
engine in the railway yards, a quarter of a mile away. I could
not believe my ears. I made one jump on to the balcony, and
beheld a locomotive under a great head of steam run out of
the yard gates, screeching like mad, enveloped in a white
cloud, and then, just abreast of old Viola’s inn, check almost
to a standstill. I made out, sir, a man—I couldn’t tell who—
dash out of the Albergo d’ltalia Una, climb into the cab, and
then, sir, that engine seemed positively to leap clear of the
house, and was gone in the twinkling of an eye. As you blow
a candle out, sir! There was a first-rate driver on the foot-
plate, sir, I can tell you. They were fired heavily upon by
the National Guards in Rincon and one other place. For-
tunately the line had not been torn up. In four hours they
reached the Construction Camp. Nostromo had his start….
The rest you know. You’ve got only to look round you. There
are people on this Alameda that ride in their carriages, or
even are alive at all to-day, because years ago I engaged a
runaway Italian sailor for a foreman of our wharf simply
on the strength of his looks. And that’s a fact. You can’t get
over it, sir. On the seventeenth of May, just twelve days after
I saw the man from the Casa Viola get on the engine, and
wondered what it meant, Barrios’s transports were enter-
ing this harbour, and the ‘Treasure House of the World,’ as
The Times man calls Sulaco in his book, was saved intact
for civilization—for a great future, sir. Pedrito, with Her-
nandez on the west, and the San Tome miners pressing on

Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard