But once I had entered into the agreement I found I had a hundred things to do and little time to do it in. Old Tom Anderly had not come back to the boarding house and I could not wait for him to appear. Captain Tugg was already thinking of loafing along to the dock where his two-stick schooner was moored. I bundled up my dunnage and went with him.
“You’ll take second mate’s berth, son,” said the long-legged Yankee. “Not that you’re fit for it, and I’ll have to be on deck jest as much as ever; but I can’t put a white man for’ard with that bilin’ of off-scourin’s I’ve got for a crew. I can trust Pedro; but there isn’t another man of the crew that I’d trust as far as I could sling a barge-load o’ bricks!
“You’ve the makin’s of a smart sailor in you—I can see that,” pursued the Captain. “And you say you’ve begun studying navigation?”
“I picked up some aboard the Scarboro, listening to Captain Hi and Ben Gibson.”
“We’ll make a mate of you in a year or two,” said Captain Tugg, confidently.
But that speech shocked me. I had no intention of following the sea a year or two. I meant just then to sail down to this place Tugg told about and take a look at the Professor individual. That’s all I wanted. Then it would be “homeward bound” for me.
We reached the schooner and I found her a nice looking craft, bright and shining, with new sails bent on and a scraped and oiled deck and pretty sticks in her. She’s been rigged new throughout and looked more like a yacht than a coasting vessel knocking about the southern trades.
I had left a note at Maria Debora’s for old Tom, and another for him to give Ben Gibson. I had some things to buy, and several of them were by Captain Tugg’s advice. He advanced me money for my purchases, and they included a second-hand Winchester and a revolver.
“We’re going to a wild piece of airth, son,” said the animal trapper.
Then I saw the man (he was an American) with whom we had left my sloop. He agreed to look after her and keep her in repair for her use, so that matter was settled. And then I did something that my conscience told me I should have attended to the moment I arrived in Buenos Ayres. I took five dollars of the sum I had drawn ahead on my wages and sent a short cable to my mother. It told her nothing but the fact that I was alive and well.