Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard
"That may be, señor, though I tremble yet. A most fierce man to look at. And what does it mean? A person employed by the steamship company talking with salteadores—no less, señor; the other horsemen were salteadores—in a lonely place, and behaving like a robber himself! A cigar is nothing, but what was there to prevent him asking me for my purse?"
"No, no, Señor Hirsch," Charles Gould murmured, letting his glance stray away a little vacantly from the round face with its hooked beak upturned towards him in an almost childlike appeal. "If it was the capataz of the cargadores you met—and there is no doubt, is there?—you were perfectly safe."
"Thank you. You are very good. A very fierce-looking man, Don Carlos. He asked me for a cigar in a most familiar manner. What would have happened if I had not had a cigar? I shudder yet. What business had he to be talking with robbers in a lonely place?"
But Charles Gould, openly preoccupied now, gave not a sign, made no sound. The impenetrability of the embodied Gould Concession had its surface shades. To be dumb is merely a fatal affliction; but the King of Sulaco had words enough to give him all the mysterious weight of a taciturn force. His silences, backed by the power of speech, had as many shades of significance as uttered words in the way of assent, of doubt, of negation—even of simple comment. Some seemed to say plainly, "Think it over"; others meant clearly "Go ahead"; a simple, low, "I see," with an
affirmative nod, at the end of a patient listening half-hour was the equivalent of a verbal contract, which
224
