"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"; others 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.
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