panic, giving
away the whole thing. Ah! They were all alike in their folly, these
hombres finos that invented laws and governments and barren tasks for
the people.

The Capataz picked up the spade, and with the feel of the handle in his
palm the desire of having a look at the horse-hide boxes of treasure
came upon him suddenly. In a very few strokes he uncovered the edges and
corners of several; then, clearing away more earth, became aware that
one of them had been slashed with a knife.

He exclaimed at that discovery in a stifled voice, and dropped on his
knees with a look of irrational apprehension over one shoulder, then
over the other. The stiff hide had closed, and he hesitated before he
pushed his hand through the long slit and felt the ingots inside. There
they were. One, two, three. Yes, four gone. Taken away. Four ingots.
But who? Decoud? Nobody else. And why? For what purpose? For what cursed
fancy? Let him explain. Four ingots carried off in a boat, and--blood!

In the face of the open gulf, the sun, clear, unclouded, unaltered,
plunged into the waters in a grave and untroubled mystery of
self-immolation consummated far from all mortal eyes, with an infinite
majesty of silence and peace. Four ingots short!--and blood!

The Capataz got up slowly.

"He might simply have cut his hand," he muttered. "But, then----"

He sat down on the soft earth, unresisting, as if he had been chained
to the treasure, his drawn-up legs clasped in his hands with an air of
hopeless submission, like a slave set on guard. Once only he lifted his
head smartly: the rattle of hot musketry fire had reached his ears, like
pouring from on high a stream of dry peas upon a drum. After listening
for a while, he said, half aloud--

"He will never come back to explain."

And he lowered his head again.

"Impossible!" he muttered, gloomily.

The sounds of firing died out. The loom of a great conflagration in
Sulaco flashed up red above the coast, played on the clouds at the head
of the gulf, seemed to touch with a ruddy and sinister reflection the
forms of the Three Isabels. He never saw it, though he raised his head.

"But, then, I cannot know," he pronounced, distinctly, and remained
silent and staring for hours.

He could not know. Nobody was to know. As might have been supposed, the
end of Don Martin Decoud never became a subject of speculation for any
one except Nostromo. Had the truth of the facts been known, there would
alw