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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
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