red soul had been
refreshed after many arid years and his outcast spirit had accepted
silently the toleration of many side-glances, he wandered haphazard
amongst the chairs and tables till Mrs. Gould, enveloped in a morning
wrapper, came in rapidly.

"You know that I never approved of the silver being sent away," the
doctor began at once, as a preliminary to the narrative of his night's
adventures in association with Captain Mitchell, the engineer-in-chief,
and old Viola, at Sotillo's headquarters. To the doctor, with his
special conception of this political crisis, the removal of the silver
had seemed an irrational and ill-omened measure. It was as if a general
were sending the best part of his troops away on the eve of battle
upon some recondite pretext. The whole lot of ingots might have been
concealed somewhere where they could have been got at for the purpose
of staving off the dangers which were menacing the security of the Gould
Concession. The Administrador had acted as if the immense and powerful
prosperity of the mine had been founded on methods of probity, on the
sense of usefulness. And it was nothing of the kind. The method followed
had been the only one possible. The Gould Concession had ransomed
its way through all those years. It was a nauseous process. He quite
understood that Charles Gould had got sick of it and had left the old
path to back up that hopeless attempt at reform. The doctor did not
believe in the reform of Costaguana. And now the mine was back again in
its old path, with the disadvantage that henceforth it had to deal not
only with the greed provoked by its wealth, but with the resentment
awakened by the attempt to free itself from its bondage to moral
corruption. That was the penalty of failure. What made him uneasy was
that Charles Gould seemed to him to have weakened at the decisive moment
when a frank return to the old methods was the only chance. Listening to
Decoud's wild scheme had been a weakness.

The doctor flung up his arms, exclaiming, "Decoud! Decoud!" He hobbled
about the room with slight, angry laughs. Many years ago both his ankles
had been seriously damaged in the course of a certain investigation
conducted in the castle of Sta. Marta by a commission composed of
military men. Their nomination had been signified to them unexpectedly
at the dead of night, with scowling brow, flashing eyes, and in a
tempestuous voice, by Guzman Bento. The old tyrant, maddened by one of
his