'People do seem to disappear in Argentine in a queer way,' said Peter with intention, and with a glance at Toffy. 'I know we had a gardener—one of the under-men—and he had a brother who disappeared altogether out there, so our man went to find him, and he, also, was never heard of again.'
'The reason for that is not very far to seek,' said Dunbar. 'The first thing you do when you come to Argentine is to leave off writing letters—at least if you are a camp man. You simply can't abide the sight of pen and ink.'
'But there must be some means of tracing a man who gets lost,' said Toffy. 'He can't disappear into space.'
'You'd wonder!' said the Scot laconically.
'Still, you know,' persisted Peter, 'if a man's alive at all, some one must know his whereabouts.'
'Obsairve,' said Dunbar, 'it doesn't require much imagination for a man to change his name as often as he likes; and I should like to know what police supervision there is over the Italian settlers, for instance, in some of the remoter estancias? Murderers are hardly ever caught out here, and murders used to be as common as a fight in a pulperia. Every man carries a knife, and if you go up-country you will find that half the peons are nearly covered with scars; and if once in a way the knife goes too deep it's just one of those things which cannot be helped, and the less said about it the better. Again,' he went on, 'suppose a man is murdered on his own estancia—a thing that used to be common enough—the peons are all in league, and they generally have had a hand in it. Their master has been giving them carne flacca (lean meat) to eat, and that is enough to upset the whole rickmatick of them.'
'I suppose they are not likely to turn on a revolution for our benefit,' said Toffy, in a tone of disappointment.
'I haven't got the fighting instinct in me,' said Dunbar literally. 'Whenever there has been fighting where I have been, I have always sat indoors until it was over.'
Peter, with a desire to lead the subject back to the case of men who disappeared, turned in the deck-chair where he was sitting enjoying a light breeze which had sprung up after dark, and said tentatively: 'I can't quite understand, you know, a man disappearing altogether and leaving no traces behind him.'
'I shall never,' said Dunbar, 'believe in the final disappearance or even in the death of any one until I have seen the doctor's certificate or the man's corpse. Men have got a queer way of turning up, and even the sea may give up secrets when you least expect it. Take the case of the Rosana,' he went on, 'and allow me to put the facts of the case before you. The Rosana was a ship that used to do good a bit of trading on the coast, and there was a man on board of her whom I used to know, and who had been once a little too well known in Argentine. Well, this ship foundered with all hands on board, and was never heard of again, although two of her life-belts were picked up, and one or two pieces of her deck-gear.'