Joseph Conrad: Nostromo

PART THIRD: THE LIGHTHOUSE 2. CHAPTER TWO (continued)

The long building was surrounded by troops, which were already
piling arms by companies and preparing to pass the night lying on
the ground in their ponchos with their sacks under their heads.
Corporals moved with swinging lanterns posting sentries all round
the walls wherever there was a door or an opening. Sotillo was
taking his measures to protect his conquest as if it had indeed
contained the treasure. His desire to make his fortune at one
audacious stroke of genius had overmastered his reasoning
faculties. He would not believe in the possibility of failure;
the mere hint of such a thing made his brain reel with rage.
Every circumstance pointing to it appeared incredible. The
statement of Hirsch, which was so absolutely fatal to his hopes,
could by no means be admitted. It is true, too, that Hirsch's
story had been told so incoherently, with such excessive signs of
distraction, that it really looked improbable. It was extremely
difficult, as the saying is, to make head or tail of it. On the
bridge of the steamer, directly after his rescue, Sotillo and his
officers, in their impatience and excitement, would not give the
wretched man time to collect such few wits as remained to him. He
ought to have been quieted, soothed, and reassured, whereas he
had been roughly handled, cuffed, shaken, and addressed in
menacing tones. His struggles, his wriggles, his attempts to get
down on his knees, followed by the most violent efforts to break
away, as if he meant incontinently to jump overboard, his shrieks
and shrinkings and cowering wild glances had filled them first
with amazement, then with a doubt of his genuineness, as men are
wont to suspect the sincerity of every great passion. His
Spanish, too, became so mixed up with German that the better half
of his statements remained incomprehensible. He tried to
propitiate them by calling them hochwohlgeboren herren, which in
itself sounded suspicious. When admonished sternly not to trifle
he repeated his entreaties and protestations of loyalty and
innocence again in German, obstinately, because he was not aware
in what language he was speaking. His identity, of course, was
perfectly known as an inhabitant of Esmeralda, but this made the
matter no clearer. As he kept on forgetting Decoud's name, mixing
him up with several other people he had seen in the Casa Gould,
it looked as if they all had been in the lighter together; and
for a moment Sotillo thought that he had drowned every prominent
Ribierist of Sulaco. The improbability of such a thing threw a
doubt upon the whole statement. Hirsch was either mad or playing
a part--pretending fear and distraction on the spur of the
moment to cover the truth. Sotillo's rapacity, excited to the
highest pitch by the prospect of an immense booty, could believe
in nothing adverse. This Jew might have been very much frightened
by the accident, but he knew where the silver was concealed, and
had invented this story, with his Jewish cunning, to put him
entirely off the track as to what had been done.