During the run across the Atlantic I had, as I have said, several long talks with Don Guzman de Silvestre. The man interested me immensely. What his profession was I could not ascertain, but from numberless little remarks he let fall, I gathered that he was the possessor of considerable wealth. Certainly he had seen a variety of strange life. Were it not that he narrated his adventures with an air of truth that left no room for doubt, it would have been impossible to have believed him. He had seen fighting in Mexico, in Nicaragua, in Brazil, and with Balmaceda in Chili.
"I suppose in South America there will be Revolutions until the end of Time," I remarked one evening, as we sat talking together in my cabin.
"I should say it is more than likely," he answered, taking his cigar from his mouth and holding it between his long, slim fingers. "If you take specimens of all the most excitable races in the world and graft them on stock even more excitable than themselves, what can you expect? In such countries Might must always be Right, and the weakest will go to the wall."
"I shouldn't care much about being President in that description of place," I returned. "It's a case of being in power and popular to-day, unpopular and assassinated to-morrow."
"There is certainly a large amount of risk in this," the Don replied meditatively. "And yet men are always to be found desirous of taking up the reins of government."
I could not help wondering whether he had ever felt the ambition he spoke of.
"I remember meeting a man in Paris some years ago," he continued after a few moments' silence, "who was what one might call a world's vagabond. He had been a soldier in French Africa, a shearer in Australia, a miner at the Cape, a stockbroker in New York, and several other things. When I met him, he was, as I have said, in Paris, and practically starving. He could speak half the languages of the world well enough to be thought a native, was absolutely fearless; indeed, taken altogether he was about as devil-may-care a sort of fellow as I had ever met in my life. Three years later he was Dictator of one of the South American Republics we have been speaking of."
"And where is he now?"
"At the end of six months another man came upon the scene, won the favour of the Standing Army, and began to make trouble for those in power, with the result that my friend had to vacate his office, also the country, at remarkably short notice. Some day he will go back and endeavour to unseat the individual who supplanted him. The latter gained his place by treachery, but if he is not careful he will lose it by something else."
"Your friend is a man who does not forget an injury then?" I remarked, with a well-defined suspicion that he was speaking of himself.