Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard
with both her hands full. After whispering for a while with a very strenuous face, she walked away, staring haughtily, and vanished into the crowd.
The circle had broken up, and the lordly capataz de cargadores, the indispensable man, the tried and trusty Nostromo, the Mediterranean sailor come ashore casually to try his luck in Costaguana, rode slowly towards the harbor. The Juno was just then swinging round; and even as Nostromo reined up again to look on, a flag was run up on the improvised flag-staff erected in an ancient and dismantled little fort at the harbor entrance. Half a battery of field-guns had been hurried over there from the Sulaco barracks for the purpose of firing the reglementary salutes for the President-Dictator and the War Minister. As the mail-boat headed through the pass, the badly timed reports announced the end of Don Vincente Ribiera's first official visit to Sulaco, and for Captain Mitchell the end of another "historic occasion." Next time when the "Hope of honest men" was to come that way, a year and a half later, it was unofficially, over the mountain tracks, fleeing after a defeat on a lame mule, to be only just saved by Nostromo from an ignominious death at the hands of a mob. It was a very different event, of which Captain Mitchell used to say:
"It was history—history, sir! And that fellow of mine. Nostromo, you know, was right in it. Absolutely making history, sir."
But this event, creditable to Nostromo, was to lead immediately to another, which could not be classed either as "history" or as "a mistake" in Captain Mitchell's phraseology. He had another word for it.
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