and ears. Could those have been Bombazo's
boots? Had I really kicked the shins of Bombazo? Surely the events of the
night had turned my brain. Bombazo's boots indeed! Bombazo skulk and hide
beneath a sofa! Impossible. Look at him now. His hair is dishevelled;
there is blood on his brow. He is dressed only in shirt and trousers, and
these are marked with blood; so is his right arm, which is bared over the
elbow, and the sword he carries in his hand. Bold Bombazo! How I have
wronged him! But the silk striped socks? No; I cannot get over that.

* * * * *

Barely a month before the events just narrated took place at the
_estancias_ of Moncrieff there landed from a sailing ship at the port of
Buenos Ayres a man whose age might have been represented by any number of
years 'twixt thirty and forty. There were grey hairs on his temples, but
these count for nothing in a man whose life has been a struggle with
Fortune and Fate. The individual in question, whom his shipmates called
Dalston, was tall and tough and wiry. He had shown what he was and what he
could do in less than a week from the time of his joining. At first he
had been a passenger, and had lived away aft somewhere, no one could tell
exactly where, for he did not dine in the saloon with the other
passengers, and he looked above messing with the stewards. As the mate and
he were much together it was supposed that Dalston made use of the first
officer's cabin. The ship had encountered dirty weather from the very
outset; head winds and choppy seas all the way down Channel, so that she
was still 'kicking about off the coast'--this is how the seamen phrased
it--when she ought to have been crossing the Bay or stretching away out
into the broad Atlantic. She fared worse by far when she reached the Bay,
having met with a gale of wind that blew most of her cloth to ribbons,
carried away her bowsprit, and made hurdles of her bulwarks both forward
and amidships. Worse than all, two men were blown from aloft while trying
to reef a sail during a squall of more than hurricane violence. I say
blown from aloft, and I say so advisedly, for the squall came on after
they had gone up, a squall that even the men on deck could not stand
against, a squall that levelled the very waves, and made the sea away to
leeward--no one could see to windward--look like boiling milk.

The storm began to go down immediately after the squall, and next day the
w