Nostromo : A Tale of the Seaboard
where there is no wind to get away with, as if it were the last lot of silver on earth to get bread for the hungry with. Ha! ha! Well, I am going to make it the most famous and desperate affair of my life wind or no wind. It shall be talked about when the little children are grown up and the grown men are old. Aha! the Monterists must not get hold of it, I am told, whatever happens to Nostromo the capataz; and they shall not have it, I tell you, since it has been tied for safety round Nostromo's neck."
"I see it," murmured Decoud. He saw, indeed, that his companion had his own peculiar view of this enterprise.
Nostromo interrupted his reflections upon the way men's qualities are made use of without any fundamental knowledge of their nature, by the proposal that they should slip the long oars out and sweep the lighter in the direction of the Isabels. It wouldn't do for daylight to reveal the treasure floating within a mile or so of the harbor entrance. The denser the darkness generally, the smarter were the puffs of wind on which he had reckoned to make his way; but to-night the gulf under its poncho of clouds remained breathless, as if dead rather than asleep.
Don Martin's soft hands suffered cruelly, tugging at the thick handle of the enormous oar. He stuck to it manfully, setting his teeth. He, too, was in the toils of an imaginative existence, and that strange work of pulling a lighter seemed to belong naturally to the inception of a new state, acquired an ideal meaning from his love for Antonia. For all their efforts the heavily laden lighter hardly moved. Nostromo could be heard
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