ere you stand?" retorted
Nostromo, contemptuously. "It would be the same thing as taking you to
Sulaco. Come, senor. Your reputation is in your politics, and mine is
bound up with the fate of this silver. Do you wonder I wish there
had been no other man to share my knowledge? I wanted no one with me,
senor."

"You could not have kept the lighter afloat without me," Decoud almost
shouted. "You would have gone to the bottom with her."

"Yes," uttered Nostromo, slowly; "alone."

Here was a man, Decoud reflected, that seemed as though he would have
preferred to die rather than deface the perfect form of his egoism. Such
a man was safe. In silence he helped the Capataz to get the grapnel on
board. Nostromo cleared the shelving shore with one push of the heavy
oar, and Decoud found himself solitary on the beach like a man in a
dream. A sudden desire to hear a human voice once more seized upon his
heart. The lighter was hardly distinguishable from the black water upon
which she floated.

"What do you think has become of Hirsch?" he shouted.

"Knocked overboard and drowned," cried Nostromo's voice confidently out
of the black wastes of sky and sea around the islet. "Keep close in the
ravine, senor. I shall try to come out to you in a night or two."

A slight swishing rustle showed that Nostromo was setting the sail. It
filled all at once with a sound as of a single loud drum-tap. Decoud
went back to the ravine. Nostromo, at the tiller, looked back from time
to time at the vanishing mass of the Great Isabel, which, little by
little, merged into the uniform texture of the night. At last, when
he turned his head again, he saw nothing but a smooth darkness, like a
solid wall.

Then he, too, experienced that feeling of solitude which had weighed
heavily on Decoud after the lighter had slipped off the shore. But while
the man on the island was oppressed by a bizarre sense of unreality
affecting the very ground upon which he walked, the mind of the Capataz
of the Cargadores turned alertly to the problem of future conduct.
Nostromo's faculties, working on parallel lines, enabled him to steer
straight, to keep a look-out for Hermosa, near which he had to pass, and
to try to imagine what would happen tomorrow in Sulaco. To-morrow, or,
as a matter of fact, to-day, since the dawn was not very far, Sotillo
would find out in what way the treasure had gone. A gang of Cargadores
had been employed in loading it into a railway truck from