Chapter XXV
In Which I Follow the Beckoning Finger of a Spectre
I shall never forget that evening as I sat beside Captain Adoniram Tugg on Maria Debora’s portico. From the street, which was well down toward the water-front, rose all manner of smells and noises; most of them were unpleasant. Sailors in foreign ports have to put up with a lot of discomfort and are thrown among the most objectionable people and endure more hardships of a different kind than are handed to them aboard ship—and that’s saying a good deal!
It was a warm night, too, and there were crowds on the street. A confusion of different dialects came up to me and it was only now and then that I heard an English word spoken. But these impressions came to me quite unconsciously at the time. I had a problem—and a hard one—to solve.
I had really not recovered from the shock I had received at the American consul’s. My money and letters were gone. Paul Downes had represented himself as me and had got away with the money with which I had expected to pay my passage home. But, of course, I really was not in great straights for means of getting back to Bolderhead.
With the experience I had had upon the whaling bark, and with my physique, I knew very well that I could obtain a berth on either a sailing or a steam vessel bound for the northern ports. I could work my way home after a fashion. Besides, I could sell my sloop for almost enough money to pay for a first-class passage to Boston on a Bayne Liner.
To tell the truth, I was more troubled by the loss of my letters than I was by the loss of my money. I was anxious about my mother—anxious to know how she had endured the shock of my absence, what her present condition was, and all about affairs at home. Besides, there might have been private information in those letters that I wouldn’t want Paul Downes to learn.
My rascally cousin had certainly set out on a career worthy of a pirate! He had run away from home—and probably because he was afraid of punishment for his crimes—and here in Buenos Ayres, so far from Bolderhead, had begun a new career of wrong-doing.