Page 541 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

Captain Mitchell stopped for a while.
‘Begad, sir! I could spin you a yarn for hours. But it’s
time we started off to Rincon. It would not do for you to
pass through Sulaco and not see the lights of the San Tome
mine, a whole mountain ablaze like a lighted palace above
the dark Campo. It’s a fashionable drive…. But let me tell
you one little anecdote, sir; just to show you. A fortnight or
more later, when Barrios, declared Generalissimo, was gone
in pursuit of Pedrito away south, when the Provisional Junta,
with Don Juste Lopez at its head, had promulgated the new
Constitution, and our Don Carlos Gould was packing up
his trunks bound on a mission to San Francisco and Wash-
ington (the United States, sir, were the first great power to
recognize the Occidental Republic)—a fortnight later, I say,
when we were beginning to feel that our heads were safe
on our shoulders, if I may express myself so, a prominent
man, a large shipper by our line, came to see me on busi-
ness, and, says he, the first thing: ‘I say, Captain Mitchell, is
that fellow’ (meaning Nostromo) ‘still the Capataz of your
Cargadores or not?’ ‘What’s the matter?’ says I. ‘Because, if
he is, then I don’t mind; I send and receive a good lot of
cargo by your ships; but I have observed him several days
loafing about the wharf, and just now he stopped me as cool
as you please, with a request for a cigar. Now, you know, my
cigars are rather special, and I can’t get them so easily as all
that.’ ‘I hope you stretched a point,’ I said, very gently. ‘Why,
yes. But it’s a confounded nuisance. The fellow’s everlast-
ingly cadging for smokes.’ Sir, I turned my eyes away, and
then asked, ‘Weren’t you one of the prisoners in the Cabil-

0 Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard