Page:Nostromo (1904).djvu/34

 crazily. She struck her breast with her open hands. "I know him. He thinks of nobody but himself."

A discharge of fire-arms near by made her throw her head back and close her eyes. Old Giorgio set his teeth hard under his white mustache, and his eyes began to roll fiercely. Several bullets struck the end of the wall together; pieces of plaster could be heard falling outside; a voice screamed "Here they come!" and after a moment of uneasy silence there was a rush of running feet along the front.

Then the tension of old Giorgio's attitude relaxed, and a smile of contemptuous relief came upon his lips of an old fighter with a leonine face. These were not a people striving for justice, but thieves. Even to defend his life against them was a sort of degradation for a man who had been one of Garibaldi's immortal thousand in the conquest of Sicily. He had an immense scorn for this outbreak of scoundrels and leperos, who did not know the meaning of the word "liberty."

He grounded his old gun, and, turning his head, glanced at the colored lithograph of Garibaldi in a black frame on the white wall; a thread of strong sunshine cut it perpendicularly. His eyes, accustomed to the luminous twilight, made out the high coloring of the face, the red of the shirt, the outlines of the square shoulders, the black patch of the Bersagliere hat with cocks' feathers curling over the crown. An immortal hero! This was your liberty; it gave you not only life, but immortality as well!

For that one man his fanaticism had suffered in diminution. In the moment of relief from the apprehension of the greatest danger, perhaps, his family had