Plate gave it to me--lost half our sticks, twenty
hours on our beam-ends, cargo shifted, and foundered. I was two days in
the boat before an English tramp picked us up. And none of the other
boats ever was picked up."

"The _Elsinore_ behaved very well last night," I put in cheerily.

"Oh, hell, that wasn't nothing," Mr. Pike grumbled. "Wait till you see a
real pampero. It's a dirty stretch hereabouts, and I, for one, 'll be
glad when we get across It. I'd sooner have a dozen Cape Horn snorters
than one of these. How about you, Mr. Mellaire?"

"Same here, sir," he answered. "Those sou'-westers are honest. You know
what to expect. But here you never know. The best of ship-masters can
get tripped up off the Plate."

"'As I've found out . . .
Beyond a doubt,"

Mr. Pike hummed from Newcomb's _Celeste_, as he went down the ladder.

CHAPTER XXIX

The sunsets grow more bizarre and spectacular off this coast of the
Argentine. Last evening we had high clouds, broken white and golden,
flung disorderly, generously, over the western half of the sky, while in
the east was painted a second sunset--a reflection, perhaps, of the
first. At any rate, the eastern sky was a bank of pale clouds that shed
soft, spread rays of blue and white upon a blue-grey sea.

And the evening before last we had a gorgeous Arizona riot in the west.
Bastioned upon the ocean cloud-tier was piled upon cloud-tier, spacious
and lofty, until we gazed upon a Grand Canyon a myriad times vaster and
more celestial than that of the Colorado. The clouds took on the same
stratified, serrated, rose-rock formation, and all the hollows were
filled with the opal blues and purple hazes of the Painted Lands.

The Sailing Directions say that these remarkable sunsets are due to the
dust being driven high into the air by the winds that blow across the
pampas of the Argentine.

And our sunset to-night--I am writing this at midnight, as I sit propped
in my blankets, wedged by pillows, while the _Elsinore_ wallows damnably
in a dead calm and a huge swell rolling up from the Cape Horn region,
where, it does seem, gales perpetually blow. But our sunset. Turner
might have perpetrated it. The west was as if a painter had stood off
and slapped brushfuls of gray at a green canvas. On this green
background of sky the clouds spilled and crumpled.

But such a background! Such an orgy of green! No shade of green was
missing in the interstices,