really means to turn up here?"

CHAPTER TWO

Captain Mitchell, pacing the wharf, was asking himself the same
question. There was always the doubt whether the warning of the
Esmeralda telegraphist--a fragmentary and interrupted message--had been
properly understood. However, the good man had made up his mind not
to go to bed till daylight, if even then. He imagined himself to have
rendered an enormous service to Charles Gould. When he thought of the
saved silver he rubbed his hands together with satisfaction. In his
simple way he was proud at being a party to this extremely clever
expedient. It was he who had given it a practical shape by suggesting
the possibility of intercepting at sea the north-bound steamer. And it
was advantageous to his Company, too, which would have lost a valuable
freight if the treasure had been left ashore to be confiscated.
The pleasure of disappointing the Monterists was also very great.
Authoritative by temperament and the long habit of command, Captain
Mitchell was no democrat. He even went so far as to profess a contempt
for parliamentarism itself. "His Excellency Don Vincente Ribiera," he
used to say, "whom I and that fellow of mine, Nostromo, had the honour,
sir, and the pleasure of saving from a cruel death, deferred too much to
his Congress. It was a mistake--a distinct mistake, sir."

The guileless old seaman superintending the O.S.N. service imagined that
the last three days had exhausted every startling surprise the political
life of Costaguana could offer. He used to confess afterwards that the
events which followed surpassed his imagination. To begin with, Sulaco
(because of the seizure of the cables and the disorganization of the
steam service) remained for a whole fortnight cut off from the rest of
the world like a besieged city.

"One would not have believed it possible; but so it was, sir. A full
fortnight."

The account of the extraordinary things that happened during that
time, and the powerful emotions he experienced, acquired a comic
impressiveness from the pompous manner of his personal narrative. He
opened it always by assuring his hearer that he was "in the thick
of things from first to last." Then he would begin by describing the
getting away of the silver, and his natural anxiety lest "his fellow" in
charge of the lighter should make some mistake. Apart from the loss of
so much precious metal, the life of Senor Martin Decoud, an agreeable,
wealthy, and well