the
room, striped by threads of quiet sunlight, alight with evil, stealthy
sounds. The Violas had them in their ears as though invisible ghosts
hovering about their chairs had consulted in mutters as to the
advisability of setting fire to this foreigner's casa.

It was trying to the nerves. Old Viola had risen slowly, gun in hand,
irresolute, for he did not see how he could prevent them. Already voices
could be heard talking at the back. Signora Teresa was beside herself
with terror.

"Ah! the traitor! the traitor!" she mumbled, almost inaudibly. "Now we
are going to be burnt; and I bent my knee to him. No! he must run at the
heels of his English."

She seemed to think that Nostromo's mere presence in the house would
have made it perfectly safe. So far, she, too, was under the spell of
that reputation the Capataz de Cargadores had made for himself by
the waterside, along the railway line, with the English and with the
populace of Sulaco. To his face, and even against her husband, she
invariably affected to laugh it to scorn, sometimes good-naturedly,
more often with a curious bitterness. But then women are unreasonable in
their opinions, as Giorgio used to remark calmly on fitting occasions.
On this occasion, with his gun held at ready before him, he stooped down
to his wife's head, and, keeping his eyes steadfastly on the barricaded
door, he breathed out into her ear that Nostromo would have been
powerless to help. What could two men shut up in a house do against
twenty or more bent upon setting fire to the roof? Gian' Battista was
thinking of the casa all the time, he was sure.

"He think of the casa! He!" gasped Signora Viola, crazily. She struck
her breast with her open hands. "I know him. He thinks of nobody but
himself."

A discharge of firearms near by made her throw her head back and close
her eyes. Old Giorgio set his teeth hard under his white moustache, and
his eyes began to roll fiercely. Several bullets struck the end of the
wall together; pieces of plaster could be heard falling outside; a voice
screamed "Here they come!" and after a moment of uneasy silence there
was a rush of running feet along the front.

Then the tension of old Giorgio's attitude relaxed, and a smile of
contemptuous relief came upon his lips of an old fighter with a leonine
face. These were not a people striving for justice, but thieves. Even to
defend his life against them was a sort of degradation for a man who had
been one