s escape. Paul had slipped away without his
father's help or knowledge of his going. Otherwise Paul would not have
been in a moneyless state, and he must have been moneyless before he
would have gone to work. Paul didn't love work, I knew; and I could
imagine that there was no fun connected with the job he seemed to have
annexed aboard the Peveril.

I reckoned I should probably hear all about it when I went to the
consul's office at Buenos Ayres. Either my mother, or Ham, would write
me the particulars of Paul's running away from home. The Bayne Liner was
no mailboat; I expected that my letters had been awaiting me for some
time at the port; and the money could have been cabled nearly a month
before this date.

Well, we got into Buenos Ayres in good season, and I noted where the
Peveril was docked. We moored outside a raft of small sailing crafts and
had the dickens of a time taking Ben Gibson ashore on his mattress. A
couple of blacks helped us, and after sending in a telephone message to
the hospital, a very modern and up-to-date motor ambulance came down and
whisked us all off to that institution. I couldn't speak Spanish, nor
could Ben; but those medicos could talk English after a fashion, and
soon Ben was fixed fine in a private room and the doctors declared he'd
be fit as a fiddle in six weeks.

Then it was up to old Tom and me to find a place to camp. The sailor was
for going back to the sloop where board and lodging wouldn't cost us
much; but I confess I was hungry for something more civilized. I wanted
bed-sheets and ham and eggs for breakfast--or whatever the Buenos Ayres
equivalent was for those viands!

We made some inquiries--of course along the water-front--and found a
decent sailors' boarding house kept by a withered old Mestizo woman (the
Mestizoes are the native population of Argentina) who had some idea of
cleanliness and could cook beans and fish in more ways than you could
shake a stick at; only, as Tom objected very soon, all her culinary
results tasted alike because of the pepper!

It was after breakfast the morning following our arrival that Tom
uttered this criticism. We were on our way to the hospital. We found Ben
feeling "bully" as he weakly told us, when we were allowed to go up to
his private room. Captain Rogers had given him drafts on a local banker
and he was fixed _right_ at that hospital. The doctors had examined him
again and pronounced him coming on fine. So, with my mind at rest