had come with the letters, had waited to ride back with
the bag to the far distant post office; and the Englishmen at the
estancia stood and watched him--a tiny figure on his tireless little
Argentine pony--riding away eastward until once more a cloud of dust
swallowed him up. The humble postman seemed to form a link with home,
and in three weeks' time the letters which they had confided to him
would be safely in the hands of those to whom they were written in
England. The pony's unshod hoofs had made hardly any sound on the turf
as he cantered off, and Lara's boy, in his loose shirt and shabby
clothes, and his bare feet hanging stirrupless on each side of the
pony, disappeared like a wraith. There was a week to wait before he
would come with any more letters.

'I wish the storm would burst or blow over,' said Ross; 'the heat is
worse than ever to-day, and it doesn't seem as though we were going to
have a cool night.'

'Even the peons look curled up,' said Toffy, glancing at a group of
men, picturesquely untidy, with loose shirts and scarlet boinas on
their heads, who lounged against the _palo a pique_ of the corral.

'What idle brutes they are, really!' said Ross; 'and they 're always
ten times worse when Chance is away. Look at those bits of paper
littering the place,' he went on fussily. 'Now I know that those men
have been told thousands of times not to let things fly about like
that. But it saves them trouble when they clean a room to sweep
everything out of doors and then leave it lying about.'

Probably most men who own property have an inherent dislike to seeing
scraps of paper lying about; the sight suggests trippers and visitors'
days, and Peter stepped down from the raised corridor, and with his
stick began poking the bits of paper into the powdery mud which was all
that at present formed the estancia garden.

'I believe we might paper the whole house with Purvis's telegrams,' he
said, laughing, as he shoved a bit of coloured paper under the ground.

'Salter,' he said to himself--'Salter. It sounds like the agony column
at home. Well, Ross and I had better stop acting as scavengers for the
household, or we may learn too much of Purvis's domestic affairs.'

He stopped poking with his stick; and, although he laughed, he was as
much annoyed at having seen the name on the telegram as he would have
been had he inadvertently overlooked another man's hand at cards.

The storm blew away in the night,