第67章

`That may be, senor , 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, senor ; 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, Senor 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 de 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'; other's 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 men had learned to trust implicitly, since behind it all there was the great San Tome mine, the head and front of the material interests, so strong that it depended on no man's goodwill in the whole length and breadth of the Occidental Province -- that is, on no goodwill which it could not buy ten times over. But to the little hook-nosed man from Esmeralda, anxious about the export of hides, the silence of Charles Gould portended a failure. Evidently this was no time for extending a modest man's business.

He enveloped in a swift mental malediction the whole country, with all its inhabitants, partisans of Ribiera and Montero alike; and there were incipient tears in his mute anger at the thought of the innumerable ox-hides going to waste upon the dreamy expanse of the Campo, with its single palms rising like ships at sea within the perfect circle of the horizon, its clumps of heavy timber motionless like solid islands of leaves above the running waves of grass. There were hides there, rotting, with no profit to anybody -- rotting where they had been dropped by men called away to attend the urgent necessities of political revolutions. The practical, mercantile soul of Senor Hirsch rebelled against all that foolishness, while he was taking a respectful but disconcerted leave of the might and majesty of the San Tome mine in the person of Charles Gould. He could not restrain a heart-broken murmur, wrung out of his very aching heart, as it were.

`It is a great, great foolishness, Don Carlos, all this. The price of hides in Hamburg is gone up -- up. Of course the Ribierist Government will do away with all that -- when it gets established firmly. Meantime--'

He sighed.

`Yes, meantime,' repeated Charles Gould, inscrutably.

The other shrugged his shoulders. But he was not ready to go yet. There was a little matter he would like to mention very much if permitted. It appeared he had some good friends in Hamburg (he murmured the name of the firm) who were very anxious to do business, in dynamite, he explained.