he boy somewhere. But it
was part of the man's extraordinary coolness that he should send him
for Peter Ogilvie to look after.

The boy arrived at the estancia one night, a poor, tired little object,
with a letter from his father in his pocket. The two had made their
way as far as the province of Salta, and from there the boy had been
sent to Taco, where, unaided, he had found a horse and had ridden over
to the estancia. He was thin and weak-looking, and had evidently
suffered a good deal from his many journeyings. Ross took him and
looked after him, and gave him some light work on the farm to do, and
there he remained while Dunbar journeyed to Salta, to find that Purvis
had left the place long before he arrived. Only a woman at Rosario
knew where he was, and this woman had learned not to tell. She had
married Purvis years ago, soon after she arrived in Argentine to be
governess to some English children. Her employers had not been kind to
her, and in a country where comforts were few she had had less than her
share of them. She was a girl of twenty then, and very pretty, and
hers was a faithful heart; and, cynical as the expression may sound,
she had had fidelity thrust upon her by the fact that she was utterly
friendless in the world. When Purvis married her she went to him
gladly. When he deserted her she even pretended to believe in him, for
the pitiful reason that there was no one else in the whole of that
strange land to whom she could turn. She was a woman to whom the easy
excuse of business could always be used in the widest sense of the
term, for she had been brought up to believe that that very
comprehensive word signified something almost as mysterious as affairs
of the spirit. It was not safe to assert of those who were engaged in
business whence they came or whither they would go. Sometimes she did
not see her husband for months, or even for a year at a time; he did
not always share his abundant days with her, but he had nearly always
come back to her when he was in trouble.

He arrived one night in Rosario without disguise of any sort, and
knocked at her humble door in one of the meanest parts of the town. He
was never beaten for long, and he announced to her that he wanted her
help in a new scheme that he had planned. His fortune was to be made
once more, but the scheme itself must remain hidden for a time. His
wife, upon this occasion, was to help him by acting as cat's-paw.

'It's a bi