Fer-De-Lance

Wolfe downed another glass of beer and slowly shook his head from side to side. "You will understand why I can recite a category of injuries. I can justly claim familiarity."

It seemed to me that Kimball wasn't going to take the hint. He was looking sympathetic and self-satisfied. In fact, he smirked. "I'm wondering why you think I'm an educated man."

Wolfe's eyebrows went up. "Isn't it obvious?"

"It's a compliment if you think so. I quit school-out in Illinois-when I was twelve, and ran away from home. It wasn't much of a home, with an uncle and aunt. My parents were dead. I haven't been in a school since. If I'm educated it's self-education."

"Not the worst kind." Wolfe's voice was low and quiet, not much more than a murmur; the voice that he used to say "go on" without saying it. "You are another proof of it, sir. And New York is itself an education for a lad of that age if he had spirit and character."

"Probably. It might be, but I didn't come to New York. I went to Texas. After a year on the Panhandle, to Galveston, and from there to Brazil and the Argentine."

"Indeed! You did have spirit; and your education is cosmopolitan."

"Well, I covered a lot of territory. I was in South America twenty years, mostly in the Argentine. When I came back to the States I nearly had to go to school again to learn English. I've lived-well, I've lived a lot of funny ways. I've seen a lot of rough stuff and I've taken part in it, but wherever and whatever it was I always did one thing, I always stuck to the rules. When I came back to the States I was selling beef, but gradually I worked into grain. That was where I found myself; grain takes a man not afraid to guess and ready to ride his guess the way a gaucho rides a horse."

"You were a gaucho?"

"No, I've always been a trader. It was born in me. Now I wonder if you would believe this. Not that I'm ashamed of it; sitting in my office sometimes, with a dozen markets waiting to see which way I'm going to jump, I remember it and I'm proud of it. For two years I was a rope peddler."

"Not really."

"Yes. Three thousand miles a season in the saddle. I still show it when I walk."

Wolfe was looking at him admiringly. "A real nomad, Mr. Kimball. Of course you weren't married then."

"No. I married later, in Buenos Aires. I had an office then on the Avenida de Mayo-"