t than a coasting vessel knocking about the southern trades.

I had left a note at Maria Debora's for old Tom, and another for him to
give Ben Gibson. I had some things to buy, and several of them were by
Captain Tugg's advice. He advanced me money for my purchases, and they
included a second-hand Winchester and a revolver.

"We're going to a wild piece of airth, son," said the animal trapper.

Then I saw the man (he was an American) with whom we had left my sloop.
He agreed to look after her and keep her in repair for her use, so
_that_ matter was settled. And then I did something that my conscience
told me I should have attended to the moment I arrived in Buenos Ayres.
I took five dollars of the sum I had drawn ahead on my wages and sent a
short cable to my mother. It told her nothing but the fact that I was
alive and well.

But that night, before it came time for me to hustle on deck and help
get the Sea Spell under way, I spent writing letters to Ham Mayberry and
Mr. Hounsditch. I gave them both the particulars of my treatment at the
consul's office and my knowledge of Paul Downes' presence at Buenos
Ayres and the trick I believed he had played upon me. Of the venture I
had now started upon in the Sea Spell I spoke only in a general way. But
I promised them I would be back in Buenos Ayres, or on my way home,
within a very few months.

These letters went off to the mail on the tug that towed the schooner
out of the tangle of shipping. We made sail in half an hour and the Sea
Spell made a good leg to windward, beginning her voyage into the
south--a voyage on which I was following the beckoning finger of a
spectre.

CHAPTER XXVI

IN WHICH THE SEA SPELL GOES ASHORE ON A MOST UNFRIENDLY COAST

I learned a whole lot beside seamanship during those next few weeks as
the schooner Sea Spell coasted Buenos Ayres Province and the vast
Colonial Territory of Magellan. A stretch of nearly a thousand miles we
had to sail to reach the Cape of the Virgins, behind which is the
entrance to the Magellan Straits.

The coastwise trade between the ports below Buenos Ayres--Bahia Blanca,
El Carmen on the Rio Negro, Port St. Antonio at at the head of the Gulf
of St. Matias, San Josefpen, Por Malaspina, Santa Cruz, and clear around
to the Pacific seaports of Chili--this coastwise trade, I say, is almost
like the trade along our Atlantic seaboard. Inland, Tugg told me, there
were vast pampasses empty of all but cattle and wil