"I know that now," she said. She was wearing a white double veil, which was her habit when in towns, so he could not see that she was very pale. He was aware of an irksome pause--a rare thing as between Marguerite Sinclair and himself.
"You go straight to your new steamer, I believe?" he went on, forcing the conversation.
"I drift into a hotel for a couple of days."
"And I cannot tempt you to visit my poor but proud Patagonia?"
She shook hands with him hurriedly, and joined the crush of passengers in the gangway. She moved with the easy grace of one who lived much in the open air. For the hundredth time she reminded him of Nancy. He sighed. At last his seven years' pilgrimage had really begun!
If this record were a story of romantic adventure, it might well start from the moment Power set foot in the hotel which a relative of an eminent French actress used to keep in Valparaiso. He had not been in the city many hours before a brutal assault on a woman led him to intervene. During the resultant scuffle he was robbed of his pocketbook, and, in addition to a narrow escape from being knifed, he was informed by a supercilious policeman that the whole affair, including the screams of a female apparently in fear of her life, had been cleverly engineered for the express purpose of relieving him of his money.
When settling his affairs at Bison he had arranged that the bulk of his revenues should be lodged with his New York bankers, to whom letters and communications of every sort were to be sent. To provide against the unforeseen--a word of wide significance when applied to the vortex into which he was plunging--it was understood that a cablegram in his name would be acted on only if it bore the code-word "Bido," a simple composite of the first syllables of Bison and Dolores, and, had it not been for the lucky chance that the bulk of his available ready money, some five thousand dollars, was safe in his room at the hotel, he might have been compelled to reveal his whereabouts to the bank forthwith.
Then, a Chilean gentleman, impressed by the fact that Power was an American, and therefore a millionaire, tried to extract gold from him by the safer and really more effective method of selling him a guano island. Singularly enough, this second thief's pertinacity opened up the narrow and hazardous path for which Power was looking. The captain of a small steamer engaged in the guano trade went out of his way to warn the American that he was being exploited by a scoundrel. Such disinterested honesty in a Chilean was attractive. Some talk followed, and, three days after arriving in Valparaiso, Power quitted that lively city as a passenger on board the _Carmen_, bound for islands in the south.