look at the rigid legs, at the feet hanging down nervelessly, with their bare toes some six inches above the floor, to know that the man had been given the estrapade till he had swooned. His first impulse was to dash forward and sever the rope at one blow. He felt for his knife. He had no knife--not even a knife. He stood quivering, and the doctor, perched on the edge of the table, facing thoughtfully the cruel and lamentable sight, his chin in his hand, uttered, without stirring:
`Tortured--and shot dead through the breast--getting cold.'
This information calmed the Capataz. One of the candles flickering in the socket went out. `Who did this?' he asked.
`Sotillo, I tell you. Who else? Tortured--of course. But why shot?' The doctor looked fixedly at Nostromo, who shrugged his shoulders slightly. `And mark, shot suddenly, on impulse. It is evident. I wish I had his secret.'
Nostromo had advanced, and stooped slightly to look. `I seem to have seen that face somewhere,' he muttered. `Who is he?'
The doctor turned his eyes upon him again. `I may yet come to envying his fate. What do you think of that, Capataz, eh?'
But Nostromo did not even hear these words. Seizing the remaining light, he thrust it under the drooping head. The doctor sat oblivious, with a lost gaze. Then the heavy iron candle-stick, as if struck out of Nostromo's hand, clattered on the floor.
`Hullo!' exclaimed the doctor, looking up with a start. He could hear the Capataz stagger against the table and gasp. In the sudden extinction of the light within, the dead blackness sealing the window- frames became alive with stars to his sight. or, casting an enormous and distorted shadow upon the wall. Swifter than a flash of lightning followed the impression of his constrained, toppling attitude--the shoulders projecting forward, the head sunk low upon the breast. Then he distinguished the arms behind his back, and wrenched so terribly that the two clenched fists, lashed together, had been forced up higher than the shoulder-blades. From there his eyes traced in one instantaneous glance the hide rope going upwards from the tied wrists over a heavy beam and down to a staple in the wall. He did not want to look at the rigid legs, at the feet hanging down nervelessly, with their bare toes some six inches above the floor, to know that the man had been given the estrapade till he had swooned. His first impulse was to dash forward and sever the rope at one blow. He felt for his knife. He had no knife--not even a knife. He stood quivering, and the doctor, perched on the edge of the table, facing thoughtfully the cruel and lamentable sight, his chin in his hand, uttered, without stirring:
`Of course, of course,' the doctor muttered to himself in English. `Enough to make him jump out of his skin.'
Nostromo's heart seemed to force itself into his throat. His head swam. Hirsch! The man was Hirsch! He held on tight to the edge of the table.
`But he was hiding in the lighter,' he almost shouted. His voice fell. `In the lighter, and -- and--'
`And Sotillo brought him in,' said the doctor. `He is no more startling to you than you were to me. What I want to know is how he induced some compassionate soul to shoot him.'
`So Sotillo knows--' began Nostromo, in a more equable voice.
`Everything!' interrupted the doctor.
The Capataz was heard striking the table with his fist. `Everything? What are you saying, there? Everything? Know everything? It is impossible! Everything?'