“You let the _Helen Mar_ alone,” I says pretty mad. “She ain't so bad as drowned corpses riding mules.”
Then Stevey put in cautiously, and said he'd never really made up his mind, and had doubts of it which he was ready to argue, supposing Sadler had any facts to put up as bearing on his and Irish's condition in nature.
Sadler said they had gone up the mule path expecting to climb Sarasara, but getting near the top of her, she began to act as if she disliked them, Sarasara did, and she threw rocks vicious and more than playful; so that they left her, and went on up the pass to look for the mule train. They didn't know anything had happened in Portate.
We put the mule-drivers up that night and charged them South American rates. That was the way Stevey Todd and I started keeping the _Helen Mar_ as a hotel. Sadler and Irish didn't care for the business. They went down to Portate and got jobs with the Transport Company, but Stevey Todd and I stayed by the _Helen Mar_, and ran the hotel.
All the year through or nearly, the mule trains might come jingling at any day or hour, coming from inland over the pass to the sea, with the packs and thirsty drivers, who paid their bills sometimes in gum rubber and Peruvian bark. Tobacco planters stopped there too, going down to Portate. Men from the ships in the harbour came out, and carried off advertisements of the hotel, and plastered the coast with them. I saw an advertisement of the “Hotel Helen Mar” ten years after in a shipping office in San Francisco, and it read:
“Hotel Helen Mar, Portate, Peru. Mountain and Sea Breezes. Board and Lodging Good and Reasonable. Sailor's Snug Harbour. Welcome Jolly Tar. Thomas Buckingham and Stephen Todd.”
That was for foreign patronage. The home advertisements were in Spanish and went up country with the mule trains. Up in the Andes they knew more about the Hotel Helen Mar than they did of the Peruvian Government. We ran the hotel to surprise South America.
It was nearly a year before we heard from the ship's owners, though we sent them the proper papers; and then a man came out, and looked at the _Helen Mar_, and says:
“I guess she belongs where she is. Running a hotel, are you?” and he carried off the sails and other rigging.