Page 542 - nostromo-a-tale-of-the-seaboard

do?’ ‘You know very well I was, and in chains, too,’ says he.
‘And under a fine of fifteen thousand dollars?’ He coloured,
sir, because it got about that he fainted from fright when
they came to arrest him, and then behaved before Fuentes
in a manner to make the very policianos, who had dragged
him there by the hair of his head, smile at his cringing. ‘Yes,’
he says, in a sort of shy way. ‘Why?’ ‘Oh, nothing. You stood
to lose a tidy bit,’ says I, ‘even if you saved your life…. But
what can I do for you?’ He never even saw the point. Not he.
And that’s how the world wags, sir.’
He rose a little stiffly, and the drive to Rincon would be
taken with only one philosophical remark, uttered by the
merciless cicerone, with his eyes fixed upon the lights of
San Tome, that seemed suspended in the dark night be-
tween earth and heaven.
‘A great power, this, for good and evil, sir. A great pow-
er.’
And the dinner of the Mirliflores would be eaten, excel-
lent as to cooking, and leaving upon the traveller’s mind
an impression that there were in Sulaco many pleasant,
able young men with salaries apparently too large for their
discretion, and amongst them a few, mostly Anglo-Saxon,
skilled in the art of, as the saying is, ‘taking a rise’ out of
his kind host.
With a rapid, jingling drive to the harbour in a two-
wheeled machine (which Captain Mitchell called a curricle)
behind a fleet and scraggy mule beaten all the time by an
obviously Neapolitan driver, the cycle would be nearly
closed before the lighted-up offices of the O. S. N. Company,

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