Gould's carriage waiting on
the road, with the yellow-faced, portly Ignacio apparently dozing on the
box. By his side Basilio, dark and skinny, held a Winchester carbine in
front of him, with both hands, and peered fearfully into the darkness.
Nostromo touched lightly the doctor's shoulder.

"Is she really dying, senor doctor?"

"Yes," said the doctor, with a strange twitch of his scarred cheek. "And
why she wants to see you I cannot imagine."

"She has been like that before," suggested Nostromo, looking away.

"Well, Capataz, I can assure you she will never be like that again,"
snarled Dr. Monygham. "You may go to her or stay away. There is very
little to be got from talking to the dying. But she told Dona Emilia in
my hearing that she has been like a mother to you ever since you first
set foot ashore here."

"Si! And she never had a good word to say for me to anybody. It is more
as if she could not forgive me for being alive, and such a man, too, as
she would have liked her son to be."

"Maybe!" exclaimed a mournful deep voice near them. "Women have their
own ways of tormenting themselves." Giorgio Viola had come out of the
house. He threw a heavy black shadow in the torchlight, and the glare
fell on his big face, on the great bushy head of white hair. He motioned
the Capataz indoors with his extended arm.

Dr. Monygham, after busying himself with a little medicament box of
polished wood on the seat of the landau, turned to old Giorgio and
thrust into his big, trembling hand one of the glass-stoppered bottles
out of the case.

"Give her a spoonful of this now and then, in water," he said. "It will
make her easier."

"And there is nothing more for her?" asked the old man, patiently.

"No. Not on earth," said the doctor, with his back to him, clicking the
lock of the medicine case.

Nostromo slowly crossed the large kitchen, all dark but for the glow of
a heap of charcoal under the heavy mantel of the cooking-range, where
water was boiling in an iron pot with a loud bubbling sound. Between
the two walls of a narrow staircase a bright light streamed from the
sick-room above; and the magnificent Capataz de Cargadores stepping
noiselessly in soft leather sandals, bushy whiskered, his muscular
neck and bronzed chest bare in the open check shirt, resembled a
Mediterranean sailor just come ashore from some wine or fruit-laden
felucca. At the top he paused, broad shouldered, narrow hipped and
supple, looking at