'I came back about my little boy,' said Purvis; 'I have to go down to Buenos Ayres, and I want to know if I may leave him here with you.'
Ross assented, and Toffy remarked that he believed with training he himself might make a very fair nursery-maid.
'Things are a little bit disturbed at my place,' said Purvis. 'I have so many mixed nationalities down there, and they don't get on well together, and are difficult to manage. I would rather not leave Dick, if you could have him—Dick will be a good boy—no?' he said, speaking in the questioning negative so common in Argentine, and addressing the pale-faced little boy in a manner far too babyish for his years.
Dick made no promise; but feeling, boy-like, that he never quite knew what being good involved, he wriggled uneasily in his chair. His father laid one of his hands on the boy's dark hair and the other beneath the delicately pointed chin, and, turning up the little face towards him, he kissed it with womanish affection.
'When will you get the train?' said Ross presently, as they sat at breakfast in the hall. 'You can't catch the one to-night, and there's not another for two days. Your best plan would have been to send us a wire about the boy, and to have taken your own steamer down to Taco; it would have saved a long bit of riding.'
'I wanted to say good-bye to my little one,' said Purvis.
'Well,' said Ross hospitably, 'you are welcome here till your train starts.'
'I must be off to-night,' said Purvis. 'If I start at eight this evening I shall catch the train at one a.m. at Taco.'
'You will be dead, Purvis!' said Peter.
Chance had once asserted that Purvis was the only man he knew who had no sense of fatigue and no sense of fear. 'It's quite true,' he said, when there was a murmur of astonishment from his listeners; 'and, much as I dislike the man, I have never known him to be afraid of anything. It may, of course, be due to a lack of imagination on his part; but I myself believe that it is the result of having been so frequently in tight places. I don't believe he can even handle a gun; and yet if he were surrounded and mobbed he would probably only blink with his watery eyes or help himself to another tabloid.'