Quotation from: Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard

Written by: Joseph Conrad


Streaming from head to foot, with his hair and whiskers hanging lank
and dripping and a lustreless stare fixed upon the bottom boards, the
Capataz of the Sulaco Cargadores resembled a drowned corpse come up from
the bottom to idle away the sunset hour in a small boat. The excitement
of his adventurous ride, the excitement of the return in time,
of achievement, of success, all this excitement centred round the
associated ideas of the great treasure and of the only other man who
knew of its existence, had departed from him. To the very last moment
he had been cudgelling his brains as to how he could manage to visit
the Great Isabel without loss of time and undetected. For the idea of
secrecy had come to be connected with the treasure so closely that even
to Barrios himself he had refrained from mentioning the existence of
Decoud and of the silver on the island. The letters he carried to the
General, however, made brief mention of the loss of the lighter, as
having its bearing upon the situation in Sulaco. In the circumstances,
the one-eyed tiger-slayer, scenting battle from afar, had not wasted his
time in making inquiries from the messenger. In fact, Barrios, talking
with Nostromo, assumed that both Don Martin Decoud and the ingots of San
Tome were lost together, and Nostromo, not questioned directly, had kept
silent, under the influence of some indefinable form of resentment and
distrust. Let Don Martin speak of everything with his own lips--was what
he told himself mentally.

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