Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/195

 shuffling of cards. For gambling the man had an insatiable thirst; he played once for forty hours without intermission; it was death to refuse a game with him; no one might cease playing without his express commands; no one durst win the stakes; and as a consequence, he accumulated at cards in a few years almost all the coined money then existing in the province.[2] Not content with this source of revenue, he became a farmer of the _diezmo_ or tithes, appropriated to himself the _mostrenco_ or unbranded cattle, by which means he speedily became proprietor of many thousand head, even established a monopoly of beef in his own favor,--and woe to the luckless fool who should dare to infringe upon the terrible barbarian's prerogative!

[Footnote 2: Thus the Monagas, the late rulers of Venezuela, are accused of denuding their country of specie in order to accumulate a vast treasure abroad in expectation of a rainy day.]

What was the state of society, it will undoubtedly be inquired, in which the defeat of a handful of men could result in such a despotism? We have already glanced at the people of La Rioja,--at their dreamy, Oriental character, at their pastoral pursuits. A community of herdsmen, scattered over an extensive territory, and deprived at one blow of the two great families to whom they had been accustomed to look up, with infantine submission, as their God-appointed chiefs,--these were not the men to stand up, unprompted by a single master-mind, to rid themselves of one whose oppression was, after all, only a new form of the treatment to which, for an entire generation, they had been subjected. La Rioja and San Juan were the only two provinces in which Quiroga's heavy hand was felt continuously; in the others he ruled rather by influence than in person; and the Gauchos, as a matter of course, were enthusiastic for a man who exalted the peasant at the expense of the citizen, whose exactions were actually burdensome only to the wealthy, and who permitted every license to his followers, with the single exception of disobedience to himself.

He was not without--it is impossible that he should have lacked--some of those instinctive and personal attributes with which almost every savage chieftain who has maintained so extraordinary an ascendency over his fellows has been endowed. Sarmiento tells us that he was tall, immensely powerful, a famous _ginete_ or horseman, a more adroit wielder of the lasso and the _bolas_ than even his rival, Rosas, capable of great endurance, and abstinent from intoxicating drinks.

His eye and voice were dreaded more by his soldiers than the lances of their antagonists. He could wring a Gaucho's secret from his breast; it was useless to attempt a subterfuge before him. Some article, we are told, was once stolen from a company of his troops, and every effort for its recovery proved fruitless. It was reported to Quiroga. He paraded the men, and, having procured a number of sticks, exactly equal in length, gave to each man one, proclaiming that the soldier whose stick should be found longer than the others next morning had been the thief. Next morning he again drew up his troops. The sticks were mustered by Quiroga himself. Not one had grown since the previous day; but there was one which was shorter than the rest. With a terrible roar, Quiroga seized the trembling Gaucho to whom the stick belonged. "Thou art the thief!" he exclaimed. It was so; the fellow had cut off a portion of the wood, hoping thus to escape detection by its growth![3]--

[Footnote 3: Since the above was written, we have heard of the adoption of an expedient identical with that of Quiroga, under similar circumstances, and with the same result. The detector was, however, an English seaman, now captain of a well-known steam-vessel, who forming part of a crew one of whom had lost a sum of money, broke off ten twigs of equal length from a broom, and distributed them among his shipmates, with the same observation as was used by the Argentine chief. Two hours later he examined them, and found that the negro steward had _shortened_ his allotted twig. The money was restored.--The coincidence is