The Three Sentinels Read Online Free PDF

which in a week’s time would have sorted themselves
out into lively features of friends and enemies. On the quay a separate group, loitering with detached insolence, looked like the Boycott Committee. Was his reception to be unpleasant? But of
course not! Hostility was seldom an excuse for bad manners. It was macabre to the English way of thinking that a man should be capable of apologising to you before cutting your throat, yet the
gesture did add a gentlemanly ease to the proceedings.
    He climbed the steps and shook hands with the chief executives of the Company. Then Gateson, the Field Manager, properly observing protocol, introduced the Mayor, the Captain of Police, the
Harbourmaster and minor civil authorities. Mat had not expected to see behind the port a street of shops shaded by a colonnade with a public building at the far end of it; in his day there had been
a sandy road between shacks of timber. The removal of citizens from—well, one could now call it a town—was not so reasonable as it had seemed in London. On an impulse he said he would
like to greet the men’s leaders if they were present. Those introductions, too, went smoothly except, he observed, for the Field Manager. His spirits rose. He wasn’t doing too badly for
an old horse of no value to anyone but the knackers.
    His own car and chauffeur waited by the quay. The glossy length was incongruous when the farthest possible drive was not more than seven miles; they used to lurch around Cabo Desierto in
anything which had four wheels and the strength to carry a load. Gateson got in with him, and they drove up the sweeping hairpins of the road to the top of the first ridge, three hundred feet above
the sea. Away to the right, above the tank farm on one side and a golf course on the other, were the three concrete sheds of 97, 98 and 98A. Low, square and uncompromising, they looked like
pill-boxes commanding the harbour.
    ‘Before I meet anyone else,’ Mat said, ‘introduce me to the Three Sentinels.’
    ‘The bastards won’t let you near them.’
    ‘One can but try. And they’ll enjoy a chance to look me over. Why are they guarding them?’
    ‘They think that between us we could fill a tanker. How the hell are we going to when they control the port?’
    The car stopped short of 97. There were half a dozen toughs outside the pill-box. Three of them continued to play cards with an indifference that was deliberately contemptuous. The other three
lounged over to the car and ordered the driver to turn round and clear out. Arms were apparently in short supply. The leader had drawn a well-oiled, first-war bayonet from its sheath. The rest had
only machetes and steel bars.
    Mat’s swift first impression was that the power behind the boycott was moral rather than material and thus all the more formidable. Obviously this picket could not stand against determined
attack by the police or the military, but any attempt to dislodge it would be the signal for all Cabo Desierto to erupt. The determination up there echoed the calm confidence of the leaders who had
shaken hands with him. The Company, they knew, was helpless. As for the State, it could not regain control without adding another pile of corpses to those of eighteen women, five children and two
men. The politicians in the Capital had made it very clear to him that they were too humane for that—or too afraid. Under all their noble eloquence he had detected an uncertainty whether the
troops would in fact obey the order to fire.
    Mat left the car and exchanged normal politenesses with the three guards who confronted him.
    ‘And good evening to you, Mr. Manager! What is it that you want?’
    ‘Only to say good evening also to the Sentinel since I have come all the way from London to see him.’
    ‘He is the same as any other.’
    ‘You think so? But neither you nor I are the same as any other.’
    That at least got him a smile. The leader could not as yet replace his bayonet in its