After dinner, as he sat writing postal cards to be despatched to the four corners of the earth, Patsy made acquaintance, over the inkstand, with the Argentino. He was a tall man with a close-cut, pointed beard that had been gold and would soon be silver, and fiery brown eyes that would always be young.
“So you are an American, too?” I heard him say to Patsy. “Are you from the States?”
“Yes; I took you for a Spaniard.”
“No, I am an American from the Argentine.”
We left Patsy and the stranger plunged in talk. Half an hour later, Patsy brought his new acquaintance to our room.
“It’s raining so hard we can’t go out,” he whispered; “this is the most comfortable place in the house—he is a kind of an American—”
“This is ‘a good Son of the Way,’ that is what the Arabs call a traveller,” said the Argentino, looking at Patsy. “He makes a friend as a sailor makes a sweetheart, between tides, waiting for his ship to sail.”
It was pouring now. Beside the noise of the rain on the roof we heard, every now and then, a strange sobbing sigh.
“Grrr! Isn’t that a creepy noise? If I were not broad awake and looking at you all by electric light, I should believe those were the ghosts of the great men of Cordova lamenting the departed glory of their city.”
“I wish they were,” said the Argentino. “They could tell me just where the old Iberian village stood, when the Phœnicians came punting up the river and discovered it, just as our people poked up the rivers in America, and discovered the Indian pueblos.”