.

Dick made no promise; but feeling, boy-like, that he never quite knew
what being good involved, he wriggled uneasily in his chair. His
father laid one of his hands on the boy's dark hair and the other
beneath the delicately pointed chin, and, turning up the little face
towards him, he kissed it with womanish affection.

'When will you get the train?' said Ross presently, as they sat at
breakfast in the hall. 'You can't catch the one to-night, and there's
not another for two days. Your best plan would have been to send us a
wire about the boy, and to have taken your own steamer down to Taco; it
would have saved a long bit of riding.'

'I wanted to say good-bye to my little one,' said Purvis.

'Well,' said Ross hospitably, 'you are welcome here till your train
starts.'

'I must be off to-night,' said Purvis. 'If I start at eight this
evening I shall catch the train at one a.m. at Taco.'

'You will be dead, Purvis!' said Peter.

Chance had once asserted that Purvis was the only man he knew who had
no sense of fatigue and no sense of fear. 'It's quite true,' he said,
when there was a murmur of astonishment from his listeners; 'and, much
as I dislike the man, I have never known him to be afraid of anything.
It may, of course, be due to a lack of imagination on his part; but I
myself believe that it is the result of having been so frequently in
tight places. I don't believe he can even handle a gun; and yet if he
were surrounded and mobbed he would probably only blink with his watery
eyes or help himself to another tabloid.'

Purvis left his horse in the cool of the paraiso trees during the day,
and a peon brought it to the door after he had eaten a frugal dinner,
during which meal he attended far more to the wants of his child than
to his own.

After dinner Peter cut some sandwiches for him, and gave him a flask of
whisky, a piece of hospitality which in all probability he would have
offered a man who was about to hang him. He had been nurse and
guardian in one to Toffy at Eton, and his long care of the delicate boy
had given him an odd sort of thoughtfulness which showed itself in
small and homely acts like this.

'When I return from Buenos Ayres,' said Purvis, 'I hope to be able to
put before you the facts which will identify Edward Ogilvie.'

'You are quite sure you have got them?' said Peter briefly.

'I am almost certain,' said Purvis.

'Of course,' went on Peter, 'you understand that all the e