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 Washington (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 business, 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
everlastingly cadging for smokes.' Sir, I turned my eyes away, and then
asked, 'Weren't you one of the prisoners in the Cabildo?' '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."
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