forefinger. "But surely!"

Emma McChesney regarded him solemnly.

"I promise to do that. You may rely on me."

Six days later they swept up the muddy and majestic Plata, whose color
should have won it the name of River of Gold instead of River of
Silver. From the boat's upper deck, Emma McChesney beheld a sky line
which was so like the sky line of her own New York that it gave her a
shock. She was due for still another shock when, an hour later, she
found herself in a maelstrom of motors, cabs, street cars, newsboys,
skyscrapers, pedestrians, policemen, subway stations. Where was the
South American languor? Where the Argentine inertia? The rush and
roar of it, the bustle and the bang of it made the twenty-three-day
voyage seem a myth.

"I'm going to shut my eyes," she told herself, "and then open them
quickly. If that little brown traffic-policeman turns out to be a big,
red-faced traffic-policeman, then I'm right, and this IS Broadway and
Forty-second."

Shock number three came upon her entrance at the Grande Hotel. It had
been Emma McChesney's boast that her ten years on the road had
familiarized her with every type, grade, style, shape, cut, and mold of
hotel clerk. She knew him from the Knickerbocker to the Eagle House at
Waterloo, Iowa. At the moment she entered the Grande Hotel, she knew
she had overlooked one. Accustomed though she was to the sartorial
splendors of the man behind the desk, she might easily have mistaken
this one for the president of the republic. In his glittering uniform,
he looked a pass between the supreme chancellor of the K.P.'s in full
regalia and a prince of India during the Durbar. He was regal. He was
overwhelming. He would have made the most splendid specimen of North
American hotel clerk look like a scullery boy. Mrs. McChesney spent
two whole days in Buenos Aires before she discovered that she could
paralyze this personage with a peso. A peso is forty-three cents.

Her experience at Bahia and at Rio de Janeiro had taught her things.
So for two days, haunted, as she was, by visions of Fat Ed Meyers
coming up close behind her, she possessed her soul in patience and
waited. On the great firm of Pages y Hernandez rested the success of
this expedition. When she thought of her little trick on Senor Pages,
her blithe spirits sank. Suppose, after all, that this powerful South
American should resent her little Yankee joke!

Her trunks went through the customs. She