Page:Nostromo (1904).djvu/29



T might have been said that there he was only protecting his own. From the first he had been admitted to live in the intimacy of the family of the hotel-keeper, who was a countryman of his. Old Giorgio Viola, a Genoese with a shaggy, white, leonine head—often called simply "the Garibaldino" (as Mohammedans are called after their prophet)—was, to use Captain Mitchell's own words, the "respectable married friend" by whose advice Nostromo had left his ship to try for a run of shore luck in Costaguana.

The old man, full of scorn for the populace, as your austere republican so often is, had disregarded the preliminary sounds of trouble. He went on that day as usual pottering about the "casa" in his slippers, muttering angrily to himself his contempt of the nonpolitical nature of the riot, and shrugging his shoulders. In the end he was taken unawares by the out-rush of the rabble. It was too late then to remove his family, and, indeed, where could he have run to with the portly Signora Teresa and two little girls on that great plain. So, barricading every opening, the old man sat down sternly in the middle of the darkened café with an old gun on his knees. His wife sat on another chair by his side, muttering pious invocations to all the saints of the calendar.

The old republican did not believe in saints, or in