ce at Toffy. 'I know we had a
gardener--one of the under-men--and he had a brother who disappeared
altogether out there, so our man went to find him, and he, also, was
never heard of again.'

'The reason for that is not very far to seek,' said Dunbar. 'The first
thing you do when you come to Argentine is to leave off writing
letters--at least if you are a camp man. You simply can't abide the
sight of pen and ink.'

'But there must be some means of tracing a man who gets lost,' said
Toffy. 'He can't disappear into space.'

'You'd wonder!' said the Scot laconically.

'Still, you know,' persisted Peter, 'if a man's alive at all, some one
must know his whereabouts.'

'Obsairve,' said Dunbar, 'it doesn't require much imagination for a man
to change his name as often as he likes; and I should like to know what
police supervision there is over the Italian settlers, for instance, in
some of the remoter estancias? Murderers are hardly ever caught out
here, and murders used to be as common as a fight in a pulperia. Every
man carries a knife, and if you go up-country you will find that half the
peons are nearly covered with scars; and if once in a way the knife goes
too deep it's just one of those things which cannot be helped, and the
less said about it the better. Again,' he went on, 'suppose a man is
murdered on his own estancia--a thing that used to be common enough--the
peons are all in league, and they generally have had a hand in it. Their
master has been giving them _carne flacca_ (lean meat) to eat, and that
is enough to upset the whole rickmatick of them.'

'I suppose they are not likely to turn on a revolution for our benefit,'
said Toffy, in a tone of disappointment.

'I haven't got the fighting instinct in me,' said Dunbar literally.
'Whenever there has been fighting where I have been, I have always sat
indoors until it was over.'

Peter, with a desire to lead the subject back to the case of men who
disappeared, turned in the deck-chair where he was sitting enjoying a
light breeze which had sprung up after dark, and said tentatively: 'I
can't quite understand, you know, a man disappearing altogether and
leaving no traces behind him.'

'I shall never,' said Dunbar, 'believe in the final disappearance or even
in the death of any one until I have seen the doctor's certificate or the
man's corpse. Men have got a queer way of turning up, and even the sea
may give up secrets when you least expect it. Ta