Barely a month before the events just narrated took place at the estancias of Moncrieff there landed from a sailing ship at the port of Buenos Ayres a man whose age might have been represented by any number of years 'twixt thirty and forty. There were grey hairs on his temples, but these count for nothing in a man whose life has been a struggle with Fortune and Fate. The individual in question, whom his shipmates called Dalston, was tall and tough and wiry. He had shown what he was and what he could do in less than a week from the time of 273 his joining. At first he had been a passenger, and had lived away aft somewhere, no one could tell exactly where, for he did not dine in the saloon with the other passengers, and he looked above messing with the stewards. As the mate and he were much together it was supposed that Dalston made use of the first officer's cabin. The ship had encountered dirty weather from the very outset; head winds and choppy seas all the way down Channel, so that she was still 'kicking about off the coast'—this is how the seamen phrased it—when she ought to have been crossing the Bay or stretching away out into the broad Atlantic. She fared worse by far when she reached the Bay, having met with a gale of wind that blew most of her cloth to ribbons, carried away her bowsprit, and made hurdles of her bulwarks both forward and amidships. Worse than all, two men were blown from aloft while trying to reef a sail during a squall of more than hurricane violence. I say blown from aloft, and I say so advisedly, for the squall came on after they had gone up, a squall that even the men on deck could not stand against, a squall that levelled the very waves, and made the sea away to leeward—no one could see to windward—look like boiling milk.
The storm began to go down immediately after the squall, and next day the weather was fine enough to make sail, and mend sail. But the ship was short-handed, for the skipper had made no provision against loss by accident. He was glad then when the mate informed him that the 'gentleman' Dalston was as good as any two men on board.
'Send him to me,' said the skipper.
'Good morning. Ahem, I hear, sir, you would be willing to assist in the working of the ship. May I ask on what terms?'
'Certainly,' said Dalston. 'I'm going out to the Argentine, to buy a bit of land; well, naturally, money is some object to me. You see?'
'Well, my terms are the return of my passage money and civility.'
'Agreed; but why do you mention civility?'
'Because I've heard you using rather rough language to your men. Now, if you forgot yourself so far as to call me a bad name I'd——'
He paused, and there was a look in his eyes the captain hardly relished.