Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/188

 rum. There you may see him seated, listening open-mouthed to the _cantor_, or Gaucho troubadour, as he sings the marvellous deeds of some desert hero, persecuted, unfortunately, by the myrmidons of justice for the numerous _misfortunes_ (_Anglicé_, murders) upon his head,--or narrates in impassioned strain, to the accompaniment of his guitar, the circumstances of one in which he has borne a part himself,--or chants the frightful end of the Gaucho Attila, Quiroga, and the punishment that overtook his murderer, the daring Santos Perez. When the song is over, the cards are dealt. Seated upon a dried bull's-hide, each man with his unsheathed knife placed ostentatiously at his side, the jolly Gauchos commence their game. Suddenly Manuel exclaims, that Pedro or Estanislao or Antonio is playing false. Down fly the cards; up flash the blades; a ring is formed. Manuel, to tell the truth, has accused his friend Pedro only for the sake of a little sport; he has never _marked_ a man yet, and thinks it high time that that honor were attained. So the sparks fly from the flashing blades, and Pedro's nose has got another gash in it, and Manuel is bleeding in a dozen places, but he will not give in just yet. Unfortunate Gaucho! Pedro the next moment slips in a sticky pool of his own blood, and Manuel's knife is buried in his heart! "He is killed! Manuel has had a misfortune!" exclaim the ring; "fly, Manuel, fly!" In another minute, and just as the _vigilantes_ are throwing themselves upon their horses to pursue him, he has galloped out of sight.

Twenty miles from the _pulpería_ he draws rein, dismounts, wipes his bloody knife on the grass, and slices off a collop of _charque_, which he munches composedly for his supper. Very likely this _misfortune_ will make him a _Gaucho malo_. The _Gaucho malo_ is an outlaw, at home only in the desert, intangible as the wind, sanguinary, remorseless, swift. His brethren of the _estancia_ pronounce his name occasionally, but in lowered tones, and with a mixture of terror and respect; he is looked up to by them as a sort of higher being. His home is a movable point upon an area of twenty thousand square miles; his horse, the finest steed that he can find upon the Pampas between Buenos Ayres and the Andes, between the Gran Chaco and Cape Horn; his food, the first beef that he captures with his lasso; his dainties, the tongues of cows which he kills, and abandons, when he has stripped them of his favorite titbit, to the birds of prey. Sometimes he dashes into a village, drinks a gourdful of _aguardiente_ with the admiring guests at the _pulpería_, and spurs away again into obscurity, until at length the increasing number of his _desgracias_ tempts the mounted emissaries of justice to pursue him, in the hope of extra reward. If suddenly beset by seven or eight of these desert police, the _Gaucho malo_ slashes right and left with his redoubted knife,--kills one, maims another, wounds them all. Perhaps he reaches his horse and is off and away amid a shower of harmless balls;--or he is taken; in which case, all that remains, the day after, of the _Gaucho malo_, is a lump of soulless clay.

Then there is the guide, or _vaqueano_. This man, as one who knows him well informs us, is a grave and reserved Gaucho, who knows by heart the peculiarities of twenty thousand leagues of mountain, wood, and plain! He is the only _map_ that an Argentinian general takes with him in a campaign; and the _vaqueano_ is never absent from his side. No plan is formed without his concurrence. The army's fate, the success of a battle, the conquest of a province, is entirely dependent upon his integrity and skill; and, strange to say, there is scarcely an instance on record of treachery on the part of a _vaqueano_. He meets a pathway which crosses the road upon which he is travelling, and he can tell you the exact distance of the remote watering-place to which it leads; if he meet with a thousand similar pathways in a journey of five hundred miles, it will still be the same. He can point out the fords of a hundred rivers; he can guide you in