Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/190

 put upon the scent. Expecting this, and knowing that the gallows lay behind him, the fugitive had adopted every expedient for baffling his pursuers: he had walked long distances upon tiptoe; had scrambled along walls; had walked backwards, crawled, doubled, leaped; but all in vain! Calébar's blood was up; his reputation was at stake; to fail now would be an indelible disgrace. If now and then he found himself at fault, he as often recovered the trail, until the bank of a water-course was reached, to which the flying criminal had taken. The trail was lost; the soldiers would have turned back; but Calébar had no such thought. He patiently followed the course of the _acequia_ for a few rods, and suddenly halting, said to his companions, "Here is the spot at which he left the canal; there is no trail,--not a footprint,--but do you see those drops of water upon the grass?" With this slight clue they were led towards a vineyard. Calébar examined it at every side, and bade the soldiers enter, saying, "He is there!" The men obeyed him, but shortly reported that no living being was within the walls. "He is there!" quietly reiterated Calébar; and, in fact, a second more thorough examination resulted in the capture of the trembling fugitive, who was executed on the following day.--There can be no doubt regarding the literal exactness of this anecdote.

At another time, we are told, a party of political prisoners, incarcerated by General Rosas, had contrived a plan of escape, in which they were to be aided by friends outside. When all was ready, one of the party suddenly exclaimed,--

"But Calébar! you forget him!"

"Calébar!" echoed his friends; "true, it is useless to escape while he can pursue us!"

Nor was any flight attempted until the dreaded trailer had been bribed to fall ill for a few days, when the prisoners succeeded in making good their escape.

He who would learn more of Calébar and his brother-trailers, let him procure a copy of the little work that now lies before us,[1] in the shape of a tattered duo-decimo, which has come to us across the Andes and around Cape Horn, from the most secluded corner of the Argentine Confederation. Badly printed and barbarously bound, this "Life of Juan Facundo Quiroga" is nevertheless replete with the evidence of genius, and bears the stamp of a generously-cultivated mind. Its author, indeed, the poet-patriot- philosopher, Don Domingo F. Sarmiento, may be called the Lamartine of South America, whose eventful career may some day invite us to an examination. Suffice it now to say, that he was expelled by Rosas in 1840 from Buenos Ayres, and that he took his way to Chile, with the intention in that hospitable republic of devoting his pen to the service of his oppressed country. At the baths of Zonda he wrote with charcoal, under a delineation of the national arms: _On ne tue point les idées_! which inscription, having been reported to the Gaucho chieftain, a committee was appointed to decipher and translate it. When the wording of the significant hint was conveyed to Rosas, he exclaimed,--"Well, what does it mean?" The answer was conveyed to him in 1852; and the sentence serves as epigraph to the present life of his associate and victim, Facundo Quiroga.

[Footnote 1: _Vida de Juan Facundo Quiroga_, etc., por Domingo F. Sarmiento. Santiago, 1845.]

In this extraordinary character we see the quintessence of that desert- life some types of which we have endeavored to delineate. As one who, rising from the lowest station to heights of uncontrolled power, as a representative of a class of rulers unfortunately too common in the republics that descend from Spain, and as a remarkable instance of brutal force and barbaric stubbornness triumphing over reason, science, education, and, in a word, civilization, he is admirably portrayed by Sr. Sarmiento. Ours be the task to condense into a few pages the story of his life and death.

The Argentine province of La Rioja embraces vast tracts of sandy desert. Destitute of rivers, bare of tree