"Is this the agent of the railroad?" I asked, when we had been introduced.
"No, she is the telegraph operator," replied the captain; "but she will tell you anything about the country you may wish to learn for the benefit of the North Americans."
"I shall be glad to, unless you would rather talk with father," she replied, turning her big blue eyes on me in a way that showed she knew very well no man would want to see, or hear, or think of anybody else while she was around.
Three or four days later the _Ushuaia_ was steaming slowly down the coast, bound for the ancient resort of pirates called Port Desire. It was a dreamy, Indian summer day, and the passengers were idling about when a servant asked me to go to the captain's quarters. I found him picking a guitar, but he put it away as I entered, and took a slip cut from a newspaper out of his pocket and handed it to me. Would I be so kind as to translate the little poem printed on the slip from English into Spanish? I would try. It was the story of a girl who stood on a pier weeping for a sailor whom the sharks had eaten in a far-away port, and it had a refrain:
"And the waves sigh low As they ebb and flow, For they know that the sea is fraught with woe."
"She gave it to me," said the captain. "It must be very beautiful," and he nodded his head to the point of the compass that was in a line to the anchorage we had left in New Gulf. "We will be back in thirty days," continued the captain, "and then I will ask her father."
It took us more than six weeks to get back. Then the captain once more hastened ashore. I watched him through a glass as he entered the door, but no one met him there. I do not know why this was so, but I guessed that this handsome little telegraph operator had some of the characteristics that make pretty girl operators in the States so tantalizingly charming. I guess she was a coquette who thought a naval ship captain legitimate prey.
[Illustration: AMONG THE RUINS AT PORT DESIRE, PATAGONIA.]
At Port Desire the view of the settlement is disappointing. One hears in advance that sixty people live there. As the ship enters port one sees a long gray corrugated iron house that is two stories high in the middle, one story high at each end, and apparently one room deep. It stands on a little plateau on the left (south) just at the entrance of the harbor. Tower Rock, a Y-shaped natural column, rises a few hundred steps away behind it, and a tall-flagstaff, braced almost as well as a ship's mast, stands in front. Both tower and staff serve the mariner as landmarks in entering port. Then three leagues away to the south of this building is seen another. It is of the sort found in American mine camps--a wood and iron structure. Next, the old ruins under the precipice at the north shore come into view, and among them are seen two more iron roofs, the bodies of the houses being very well concealed by the old stone walls. Last of all, one sees close down to the water on the south side, and not far from the first house noticed, another iron structure that is low, but wide and long, and has a pile of very crooked firewood on the beach before it. And that is all one sees of the settlement of Port Desire.