a lame mule, to be only just saved by Nostromo from an ignominious death
at the hands of a mob. It was a very different event, of which Captain
Mitchell used to say--

"It was history--history, sir! And that fellow of mine, Nostromo, you
know, was right in it. Absolutely making history, sir."

But this event, creditable to Nostromo, was to lead immediately to
another, which could not be classed either as "history" or as "a
mistake" in Captain Mitchell's phraseology. He had another word for it.

"Sir" he used to say afterwards, "that was no mistake. It was a
fatality. A misfortune, pure and simple, sir. And that poor fellow of
mine was right in it--right in the middle of it! A fatality, if ever
there was one--and to my mind he has never been the same man since."





PART SECOND THE ISABELS


CHAPTER ONE

Through good and evil report in the varying fortune of that struggle
which Don Jose had characterized in the phrase, "the fate of national
honesty trembles in the balance," the Gould Concession, "Imperium in
Imperio," had gone on working; the square mountain had gone on pouring
its treasure down the wooden shoots to the unresting batteries of