Pasted into an old scrap-book, chiefly filled with newspaper cuttings from Texan and Mexican newspapers containing accounts of Indian fights, the prowess of different horses (notably of a celebrated “claybank,” which carried the mail-rider from El Paso to Oakville, Arizona), and interspersed with advertisements of strayed animals, pictures of Gauchos, Indians, Chilians, Brazilians, and Gambusinos, is an old coffee-coloured business card. On it is set forth, that Francisco Cardozo de Carvallo is the possessor of a “Grande Armazem de Fazendas, ferragems, drojas, chapeos, miudezas, e objectos de fantasia e de modas.”

All the above, “Com grande reduccao nos preÇos.” Then occurs the significant advertenÇa, “Mas A Dinheiro,” and the address Rua do Commercio, No. 77.—Cruz Alta.

Often on winter nights when all the air is filled with whirling leaves dashing against the panes, when through the house sweep gusts of wind making the passages unbearable with cold, the rooms disconsolate, and the whole place feel eerie and ghostlike as the trees creak, groan and labour, like a ship at sea, I take the scrap-book down.

In it are many things more interesting by far to me at certain times than books or papers, or than the conversation of my valued friends; almost as great a consolation as is tobacco to a bruised mind; and then I turn the pages over with delight tinged with that melancholy which is the best part of remembrance.

So amongst tags of poetry as Joaquim Miller’s lines “For those who fail,” the advertisement for my fox-terrier Jack, the “condemndest little buffler” the Texans called him, couched in the choicest of Castilian, and setting forth his attributes, colour and name, and offering five dollars to any one who would apprehend and take him to the Callejon del Espiritu Santo, Mexico, curious and striking outsides of match-boxes, one entire series illustrating the “Promessi Sposi”; of scraps, detailing news of Indian caciques long since dead, a lottery-ticket of the State of Louisiana, passes on “busted” railways, and the like, is this same coffee-coloured card.

I cannot remember that I was a great dealer at the emporium, the glories of which the card sets forth, except for cigarettes and “Rapadura”; that is, raw sugar in a little cake done up in maize-leaves, matches, and an occasional glass of white Brazilian rum.

Still during two long months the place stood to me in lieu of club, and in it I used to meet occasional German “Fazenderos,” merchants from Surucaba, and officers on the march from San Paulo to Rio Grande; and there I used to lounge, waiting for customers to buy a “Caballada” of some hundred horses, which a friend and I had brought with infinite labour from the plains of Uruguay. Thinking upon the strange and curious types I used to meet, clad for the most part in loose black Turkish trousers, broad-brimmed felt hats kept in their place by a tasselled string beneath the chin, in real or sham vicuÑa ponchos, high patent-leather boots, sewn in patterns with red thread; upon the horses with silver saddles and reins, securely tied to posts outside the door, and on the ceaseless rattle of spurs upon the bare brick floors which made a sort of obligato accompaniment to the monotonous music of the guitar, full twenty years fall back.

Yet still the flat-roofed town, capital of the district in Rio Grande known as Encima de la Sierra, the stopping-place for the great droves of mules which from the Banda Oriental and Entre Rios are driven to the annual fair at Surucaba; the stodgy Brazilian countrymen so different from the Gauchos of the River Plate; the negroes at that time slaves; the curious vegetation, and the feeling of being cut off from all the world, are fresh as yesterday.

Had but the venture turned out well, no doubt I had forgotten it, but to have worked for four long months driving the horses all the day through country quite unknown to me, sitting the most part of each night upon my horse on guard, or riding slowly round and round the herd, eating jerked beef, and sleeping, often wet, upon the ground, to lose my money, has fixed the whole adventure on my memory for life.

Failure alone is interesting.

Successful generals with their hands scarce dry from the blood of half-armed foes; financiers, politicians; those who rise, authors whose works run to a dozen editions in a year: the men who go to colonies with or without the indispensable half-crown and come back rich, to these we give our greetings in the market-place; we make them knights, marking their children with the father’s bourgeois brand: we marvel at their fortune for a brief space, and make them doctors of civil law, exposing them during the process to be insulted by our undergraduates, then they drop out of recollection and become uninteresting, as nature formed their race.

But those who fail after a glorious fashion, Raleigh, Cervantes, Chatterton, Camoens, Blake, Claverhouse, Lovelace, Alcibiades, Parnell, and the last unknown deck-hand who, diving overboard after a comrade, sinks without saving him: these interest us, at least they interest those who, cursed with imagination, are thereby doomed themselves to the same failure as their heroes were. The world is to the unimaginative, for them are honours, titles, rank and ample waistbands; foolish phylacteries broad as trade union banners; their own esteem and death to sound of Bible leaves fluttered by sorrowing friends, with the sure hope of waking up immortal in a new world on the same pattern as the world that they have left.

After a wretched passage down the coast, we touched at Rio, and in the Rua Direita, no doubt now called Rio Primero de Mayo or some other revolutionary date, we saw a Rio Grandense soldier on a fine black horse. As we were going to the River Plate to make our fortunes, my companion asked me what such a horse was worth, and where the Brazilian Government got their remounts. I knew no horses of the kind were bred nearer than Rio Grande, or in Uruguay, and that a horse such as the trooper rode, might in the latter country be worth an ounce. We learned in Rio that his price was eighty dollars, and immediately a golden future rose before our eyes. What could be easier than in Uruguay, which I knew well and where I had many friends (now almost to a man dead in the revolutions or killed by rum), to buy the horses and drive them overland to the Brazilian capital?

We were so confident of the soundness of our scheme that I believe we counted every hour till the boat put to sea.

Not all the glories of the Tijuca with its view across the bay straight into fairyland, the red-roofed town, the myriad islets, the tall palm-tree avenue of Botafogo, the tropic trees and butterflies, and the whole wondrous panorama spread at our feet, contented us.

During the voyage to the River Plate we planned the thing well out, and talked it over with our friends. They, being mostly of our age, found it well reasoned, and envied us, they being due at banks and counting-houses, and other places where no chance like ours of making money, could be found. Arrived in Buenos Ayres, a cursed chance called us to Bahia Blanca upon business, but though we had a journey of about a thousand miles to make through territory just wasted by the Indians and in which at almost every house a man or two lay dead, we counted it as nothing, for we well knew on our return our fortunes were assured.

And so the autumn days upon the Arroyo de los Huesos seemed more glorious than autumn days in general, even in that climate perhaps the most exhilarating of the world. Horses went better, “matÉ” was hotter in the mouth, the pulperia caÑa seemed more tolerable, and the “China” girls looked more desirable than usual, even to philosophers who had their fortunes almost as good as made.

Our business in the province of Buenos Ayres done, and by this time I have forgotten what it was, we sold our horses, some of the best I ever saw in South America, for whatever they would fetch, and in a week found ourselves in Durazno, a little town in Uruguay, where in the camps surrounding, horses and mules were cheap.

About a league outside the town, and in a wooded elbow of the river Yi, lived our friend Don Guillermo. I myself years before had helped to build his house; and in and out of season, no matter if I arrived upon a “pingo” shining with silver gear, or on a “mancaron” with an old saddle topped by a ragged sheepskin, I was a welcome guest.

Ah! Don Guillermo, you and your brother Don Tomas rise also through the mist of twenty years.

Catholics, Scotchmen, and gentlemen, kindly and hospitable, bold riders and yet so religious that, though it must have been a purgatory to them as horsemen, they used to trudge on foot to mass on Sunday, swimming the Yi when it was flooded, with their clothes and missals on their heads, may God have pardoned you.

Not that the sins of either of them could have been great, or of the kind but that the briefest sojourn in purgatory should not have wiped them out.

To those rare Catholic families in Scotland an old-world flavour clings. When Knox and that “lewid monk,” the Regent Murray, all agog for progress and so-called purer worship, pestered and bothered Scotland into a change of faith, those few who clung to Catholicism seemed to become repositories of the traditions of an older world.

Heaven and hell, no resting-place for the weaker souls between, have rendered Scotland a hard place for the ordinary man who wants his purgatory, even if by another name. Surely our Scottish theologians had done well, although they heated up our hell like a glass furnace, to leave us purgatory; that is if “Glesca” be not purgatory enough even for those who, like North Britons, have no doubt on any subject either in heaven above, or in the earth below. So to the house of Don Guillermo—even the name has now escaped me, though I see it, mud-built and thatched with “paja,” standing on a little sandy hill, surrounded on two sides by wood, on the others looking straight out upon the open “camp”—hot foot we came. Riding upon two strayed horses known as “ajenos,” bought for a dollar each in Durazno, we arrived, carrying our scanty property in saddle-bags, rode to the door, called out “Hail, Mary!” after the fashion of the country and in deference to the religion of our hosts, which was itself of so sincere a caste that every one attempted to conform to it, as far as possible, whilst in their house; received the answer “Without sin conceived”; got off, and straightway launched into a discussion of our plan.

Assembled in the house were Wycherley, Harrington and Trevelyan, and other commentators, whose names have slipped my mind. Some were “estancieros,” that is cattle or sheep farmers; others again were loafers, all mostly men of education, with the exception of Newfoundland Jack, a sailor, who had left the navy in a hurry, after some peccadillo, but who, once in the camp, took a high place amongst men, by his knowledge of splicing, making turks’ heads, and generally applying all his acquired sea-lore to saddlery, and from a trick he had of forcing home his arguments with a short knife, the handle fixed on with a raw cow’s tail, and which in using he threw from hand to hand, and generally succeeded in burying deeply in his opponent’s chest. Our friends all liked the scheme, pronounced it practical and businesslike, and, to show goodwill, despatched a boy to town to bring a demijohn of caÑa back at full speed, instructing him to put it down to our account, not to delay upon the way, and to be careful no one stole it at the crossing of the Yi.

Long we sat talking, waiting for the advent of the boy, till at last, seeing he would not come that night, and a thick mist rising up from the river having warned us that the night was wearing on, we spread our saddles on the floor, and went to sleep. At daybreak, cold and miserable, the boy appeared, bringing the caÑa in a demijohn, and to our questions said he had passed the river, hit the “rincon,” and heard the dogs bark in the mist; but after trying for an hour could never find the house. Then, thinking that his horse might know the way, laid down the reins, and the horse took him straight to the other horses, who, being startled at the sudden apparition of their friend saddled and mounted in the dead of night, vanished like spectres into the thickest of the fog. Then tired of riding, after an hour or two, took off his saddle, and had passed the night, as it appeared at daybreak, not a quarter of a mile away.

Between the town and Don Guillermo’s house there ran a river called the Yi; just at the pass a “balsa” plied, drawn over by stout ropes. On either side the “pass” stood pulperias, that is camp-stores, where gin and sardines, Vino Carlon, Yerba, and all the necessaries of frontier life could be procured. Horses and cattle, mules and troops of sheep passed all the day, and gamblers plied their trade, whilst in some huts girls, known as “Chinas,” watched the passers-by, loitering in deshabille before their mare’s hide doors, singing “cielitos,” or the “gato,” to the accompaniment of a guitar, or merely shouting to the stranger, “Che, si quieres cosa buena vente por acÁ.” A half-Arcadian, half-Corinthian place the crossing was; fights there were frequent, and a “Guapeton,” that is, a pretty handler of his knife, once kept things lively for a month or two, challenging all the passers-by to fight, till luckily a Brazilian, going to the town, put things in order with an iron-handled whip.

The owner of the “balsa,” one Eduardo PeÑa, cherished a half-romantic, half-antagonistic friendship for Don Guillermo, speaking of him as “muy Catolico,” admiring his fine seat upon a horse, and yet not understanding in the least the qualities which made him a man of mark in all the “pagos” from the Porongos to the Arazati. “Catolico,” with PeÑa, was but a matter of pure faith, and going to mass a work of supererogation; and conduct such as the eschewal of the China ladies at the pass, with abstinence from all excess in square-faced gin, dislike to montÉ, even with “Sota en la puerta,” and the adversary with all his money staked upon another card, seemed to him bigotry; for bigotry is after all not so much mere excess of faith or want of tolerance, but a neglect to fall into the vices of our friends. So, mounted on our two “agenos,” one a jibber, the other a kicker at the stirrup, and extremely hard to mount, we scoured the land. Gauchos, Brazilians, negroes, troperos, cattle-farmers, each man in the whole “pago” had at least a horse to sell. Singly, driven, led, pulled unwillingly along in raw-hide ropes, and sitting back like lapdogs walking in the park, the horses came. We bought them all after much bargaining, and then began to hunt about at farms, estancias, and potreros, and to inquire on every side where horses could be got. All the “dead beats,” “sancochos,” buck-jumpers, wall-eyed and broken-backed, we passed in a review. An English sailor rode up to the place, dressed as a Gaucho, speaking but little English, with a west-country twang. He, too, had horses, which we bought, and the deal over, launched into the story of his life.

It seemed that he had left a man-of-war some fifteen years ago, married a native girl and settled down, and for ten years had never met an Englishman. In English, still a sailor, but in Spanish, a gentleman, courteous and civil, and fit to take his place with any one; full of fine compliments, and yet a horse-coper; selling us three good horses, and one, that the first time I mounted him kicked like a zebra, although our friend had warranted him quite free from vice, well bitted, and the one horse he had which he reserved in general for the saddle of his wife.

In a few days we had collected sixty or seventy, and to make all complete, a man arrived, saying that specially on our account, thirteen wild horses, or horses that had run wild, had been enclosed. He offered them on special terms, and we, saddling at once, rode twelve or thirteen leagues to see them; and after crossing a river, wading through a swamp, and winding in and out through a thick wood for several miles, we reached his house. There, in a strong corral, the horses were, wild-eyed and furious, tails sweeping to the ground, manes to their knees, sweating with fear, and trembling if any one came near. One was a piebald dun, about eight years of age, curly all over like a poodle; one Pampa, that is, black with a head as if it had been painted white to the ears; behind them, coal-black down to his feet, which, curiously enough, were all four white. A third, Overo Azulejo, slate-coloured and white; he was of special interest, for he had twisted in his mane a large iron spur, and underneath a lump as large as an apple, where the spur had bumped upon his neck for years during his gallop through the woods and plains. Each horse had some peculiarity, most had been tame at one time, and were therefore more to be dreaded than if they had been never mounted in their lives.

As it was late when we arrived we tied our horses up and found a ball in progress at the house. Braulio Islas was the owner’s name, a man of some position in the land, young and unmarried, and having passed some years of his life in Monte Video, where, as is usual, he had become a doctor either of law or medicine; but the life had not allured him, and he had drifted back to the country, where he lived, half as a Gaucho, half as a “Dotorcito,” riding a wild horse as he were part of him, and yet having a few old books, quoting dog Latin, and in the interim studying international law, after the fashion of the semi-educated in the River Plate. Fastening our horses to long twisted green-hide ropes, we passed into the house. “Carne con cuero” (meat cooked with the hide) was roasting near the front-door on a great fire of bones. Around it men sat drinking matÉ, smoking and talking, whilst tame ostriches peered into the fire and snapped up anything within their reach; dogs without hair, looking like pigs, ran to and fro, horses were tied to every post, fire-flies darted about the trees; and, above all, the notes, sung in a high falsetto voice of a most lamentable Paraguayan “triste,” quavered in the night air and set the dogs a-barking, when all the company at stated intervals took up the refrain, and chanted hoarsely or shrilly of the hardships passed by Lopez in his great camp at PirayÚ.

Under the straw-thatched sheds whole cows and sheep were hung up; and every one, when he felt hungry, cut a collop off and cooked it in the embers, for in those days meat had no price, and if you came up hungry to a house a man would say: “There is a lazo, and the cattle are feeding in a hollow half a league away.”

A harp, two cracked guitars, the strings repaired with strips of hide, and an accordion, comprised the band. The girls sat in a row, upon rush-seated chairs, and on the walls were ranged either great bowls of grease in which wicks floated, or homemade candles fixed on to nails, which left them free to gutter on the dancers’ heads. The men lounged at the door, booted and spurred, and now and then one walked up to the girls, selected one, and silently began to dance a Spanish valse, slowly and scarcely moving from the place, the hands stretched out in front, and the girl with her head upon his shoulder, eyes fast closed and looking like a person in a trance. And as they danced the musicians broke into a harsh, wild song, the dancers’ spurs rattled and jingled on the floor, and through the unglazed and open windows a shrill fierce neigh floated into the room from the wild horses shut in the corral. “Dulces,” that is, those sweetmeats made from the yolk of eggs, from almonds, and from nuts, and flavoured with cinnamon and caraways brought by the Moors to Spain, and taken by the Spaniards to the Indies, with sticky cakes, and vino seco circulated amongst the female guests. The men drank gin, ate bread (a delicacy in the far-off “camp”), or sipped their matÉ, which, in its little gourds and silver tube, gave them the appearance of smoking some strange kind of pipe.

“Que bailen los Ingleses,” and we had to acquit ourselves as best we could, dancing a “pericon,” as we imagined it, waving our handkerchiefs about to the delight of all the lookers-on. Fashion decreed that, the dance over, the “cavalier” presented his handkerchief to the girl with whom he danced. I having a bad cold saw with regret my new silk handkerchief pass to the hand of a mulatto girl, and having asked her for her own as a remembrance of her beauty and herself, received a home-made cotton cloth, stiff as a piece of leather, and with meshes like a sack.

Leaving the dance, as Braulio Islas said, as more “conformable” to Gauchos than to serious men we started bargaining. After much talking we agreed to take the horses for three dollars each, upon condition that in the morning Islas and all his men should help us drive a league or two upon the road. This settled, and the money duly paid, we went to bed, that is, lay down upon our saddles under the “galpon.” To early morning the guitars went on, and rising just about day-break we found the revellers saddling their horses to depart in peace. We learned with pleasure there had been no fight, and then after a matÉ walked down to the corral. Knowing it was impossible to drive the horses singly, after much labour we coupled them in twos. I mounted one of them, and to my surprise, he did not buck, but after three or four plunges went quietly, and we let the others out. The bars were scarcely down when they all scattered, and made off into the woods. Luckily all the drivers were at hand, and after three or four hours’ hard galloping we got them back, all except one who never reappeared; and late in the evening reached Don Guillermo’s house and let our horses into a paddock fenced with strong posts of Ñandubay or Tala and bound together with pieces of raw hide.

So for a week or two we passed our lives, collecting horses of every shade and hue, wild, tame and bagualon, that is, neither quite wild nor tame, and then, before starting, had to go to “La Justicia” to get a passport with their attributes and marks.

I found the Alcalde, one Quintin Perez, sitting at his door, softening a piece of hide by beating on it with a heavy mallet of Ñandubay. He could not read, but was so far advanced towards culture as to be able to sign his name and rubricate. His rubric was most elaborate, and he informed me that a signature was good, but that he thought a rubric more authentic. Though he could not decipher the document I brought for signature, he scrutinized the horses’ marks, all neatly painted in the margin, discussed each one of them, and found out instantly some were from distant “pagos,” and on this account, before the signature or rubric was appended, in addition to the usual fee, I was obliged to “speak a little English to him,” which in the River Plate is used to signify the taking and receiving of that conscience money which causes the affairs of justice to move pleasantly for all concerned. Meanwhile my partner had gone to town (Durazno) to arrange about the revision of the passport with the chief authorities. Nothing moved quickly at that time in Uruguay; so after waiting one or two days in town, without a word, he quietly let loose his horse in a by-street at night to save his keep, and casting about where he should leave his saddle, thought that the cloak-room of the railway-station might be safe, because the station-master was an Englishman. The saddle, having silver stirrups and good saddle-cloths and silver-mounted reins and bit, was worth more than the horse, which, being a stray, he had bought for a couple of dollars, and was not anxious to retain.

After a day or two of talk, and “speaking English,” he wanted his saddle, and going to the station found it gone. Not being up at that time in the ways of the Republic, he informed the police, waited a day, then two days, and found nothing done. Luckily, just at that time, I came to town and asked him if he had offered a reward. Hearing he had not, we went down to see the Commissary of Police, and found him sitting in his office training two cocks to fight. A rustle and the slamming of a door just marked the hurried exit of a lady, who must have been assisting at the main. Compliments duly passed, cigarettes lighted and matÉ circulating, “served” by a negro soldier in a ragged uniform with iron spurs upon his naked feet who stood attention every time he passed the gourd in which the matÉ is contained to either of us, we plunged into our talk.

“Ten dollars, Comissario.”

“No, seÑor, fifteen, and a slight gratification to the man who brings the saddle back.”

We settled at thirteen, and then the Commissary winked slowly, and saying, “This is not Europe,” asked for a little something for himself, received it, and calling to the negro, said—

“Tio Gancho, get at once to horse, take with you one or two men, and scour the ‘pago’ till you bring this saddle back. See that you find it, or I will have your thumbs both broken as your toes are, by San Edovige and by the Mother of our Lord.”

A look at Tio Gancho showed both his big toes had been broken when a slave in Brazil, either to stop him walking, or, as the Commissary thought, to help him to catch the stirrup, for he was a noted rider of a redomon. [20]Duly next day the saddle was brought (so said the Commissary) into the light of justice, and it then appeared one of the silver stirrups had been lost. The Commissary was much annoyed, reproached his men, being, as he said he was: “Un hombre muy honrado.” After thinking the case well out, he returned me two and a half dollars out of the thirteen I had agreed to pay. Honour no doubt was satisfied upon both sides, and a new silver stirrup cost ten dollars at the least; but as the saddle was well worth sixty, we parted friends. That is, we should have parted so had not the “Hombre muy honrado” had another card to play.

“How long do you want the thief detained?” he asked. And we, thinking to be magnanimous and to impress him with our liberal ideas, said loftily—

“A month will do.”

“All right,” he answered, “then I must trouble you for thirty dollars more for the man’s maintenance, and for the gaoler’s fee.” This was a stopper over all, and I said instantly—

“Being ignorant of your laws, perhaps we have looked at the man’s offence too hardly, a week will do.” So after paying five dollars down, we invited the Commissary to drink, and left him well knowing that we should not be out of sight before the man would be released, and the five dollars be applied strictly towards the up-keep of “justice” in the Partido of the Yi. Months afterwards I heard the culprit worked two days cutting down weeds with a machete in the public square; then, tired of it, being “un hombre de Á caballo,” had volunteered to join the army, was received into the ranks, and in a few weeks’ time rose to be sergeant, for he could sign his name.

All being ready, and some men (one a young Frenchman born in the place) being found with difficulty, the usual revolution having drained off the able-bodied men, we made all ready for the start. We bid good-bye to Don Guillermo, and to Don Tomas, giving them as an addition to their library (which consisted of some lives of saints and an odd volume of “el culto al Falo,” which was in much request), our only book the “Feathered Arrow,” either by Aimard or by Gerstaeker, and mounting early in the morning after some trouble with the wilder of our beasts, we took the road.

For the first few leagues Don Guillermo rode with us, and then, after a smoke, bade us goodbye and rode away; his tall, lithe figure dressed in loose black merino trousers tucked into his boots, hat tied beneath his chin, and Pampa poncho, fading out of sight, and by degrees the motion of his right arm touching his horse up, Gaucho fashion, at every step, grew slower, then stood still, and lastly vanished with the swaying figure of the rider, out of sight. Upon what Pampa he now gallops is to me unknown, or whether, where he is, horses accompany him; but I would fain believe it, for a heaven on foot would not be heaven to him; but I still see him as he disappeared that day swaying to every motion of his horse as they had been one flesh. “Adios, Don Guillermo,” or perhaps “hasta luego,” you and your brother Don Tomas, your hospitable shanty, and your three large cats, “Yanish” and “Yanquetruz,” with one whose name I cannot now recall, are with me often as I think on times gone by; and still to-day (if it yet stands), upon the darkest night I could take horse outside Durazno, cross the Yi, not by the “balsa,” but at the ford below, and ride without a word to any one straight to your house.

Days followed one another, and nights still caught us upon horseback, driving or rounding up our horses, and nothing interested us but that “el Pangare” was lame; “el Gargantillo” looked a little thin, or that “el Zaino de la hacinda” was missing in the morning from the troop. Rivers we passed, the Paso de los Toros, where the horses grouped together on a little beach of stones refused to face the stream. Then sending out a yoke of oxen to swim first, we pressed on them, and made them plunge, and kept dead silence, whilst a naked man upon the other bank called to them and whistled in a minor key; for horses swimming, so the Gauchos say, see nothing, and head straight for a voice if it calls soothingly. And whilst they swam, men in canoes lay down the stream to stop them drifting, and others swimming by their side splashed water in their faces if they tried to turn. The sun beat on the waste calling out the scent of flowers; kingfishers fluttered on the water’s edge, herons stood motionless, great vultures circled overhead, and all went well till, at the middle of the stream, a favourite grey roan mare put up her head and snorted, beat the water with her feet, and then sank slowly, standing quite upright as she disappeared.

Mountains and plains we passed, and rivers fringed with thick, hard thorny woods; we sweltered in the sun, sat shivering on our horses during the watches of the night, slept fitfully by turns at the camp fire, ate “charqui” and drank matÉ, and by degrees passing the Paso de los Novillos, San Fructuoso, and the foot-hills of Haedo and the Cuchilla de Peralta with its twin pulperias, we emerged on to the plain, which, broken here and there by rivers, slopes toward the southern frontier of Brazil. But as we had been short-handed from the first, our “caballada” had got into bad ways. A nothing startled them, and the malign example of the group of wildlings brought from Braulio Islas, led them astray, and once or twice they separated and gave us hours of work to bring them back. Now as a “caballada” which has once bolted is in the future easily disposed to run, we gave strict orders no one was to get off, though for a moment, without hobbling his horse.Camped one cold morning on a river, not far from Brazil, and huddled round a fire, cooking some sausages, flavoured with Chile pepper, over a fire of leaves, one of our men who had been on horseback watching all the night, drew near the fire, and getting off, fastened his reins to a heavy-handled whip, and squatted on them, as he tried to warm his hands. My horse, unsaddled, was fastened by a lasso to a heavy stone, and luckily my partner and the rest all had their horses well secured, for a “coati” dived with a splash after a fish into the river. In a moment the horses all took fright, and separating, dashed to the open country with heads and tails erect, snorting and kicking, and left us looking in despair, whilst the horse with the whip fastened to the reins joined them, and mine, tied to the stone, plunged furiously, but gave me time to catch him, and mounting barebacked, for full five hours we rode, and about nightfall brought the “caballada” back to the camp, and driving them into an elbow of the river, lighted great fires across the mouth of it, and went to sleep, taking it conscientiously in turns to curse the man who let his horse escape.

Five leagues or so upon the road the frontier lay, and here the Brazilian Government had guards, but we being business men smuggled our horses over in the night, led by a noted smuggler, who took us by devious paths, through a thick wood, to a ford known to him, only just practicable, and this we passed swimming and wading, and struggling through the mud. The river wound about through beds of reeds, trees known as “sarandis” grew thickly on the banks, and as we passed “carpinchos” [26] snorted; great fish leaped into the air and fell with a resounding crash into the stream, and in the trees was heard the scream of vultures, as frightened by our passage they rose and weltered heavily through the thick wood. By morning we were safe into Brazil, passing a league or more through a thick cane-brake, where we left several of our best horses, as to pursue them when they straggled was impossible without running the risk of losing all the rest. The crossing of the river had brought us to another world. As at Carlisle and Gretna in the old days, or as at Tuy and Valenza even to-day, the river had set a barrier between the peoples as it had been ten miles instead of a few hundred yards in width. Certainly, on the Banda Oriental, especially in the department of TacuarembÒ, many Brazilians had emigrated and settled there, but living amongst the Gaucho population, in a measure they had been forced to conform to the customs of the land. That is, they practised hospitality after the Gaucho fashion, taking no money from the wayfaring man for a piece of beef; they lent a horse, usually the worst they had, if one came to their house with one’s horse tired; their women showed themselvesoccasionally; and not being able to hold slaves, they were obliged to adopt a different tone to men in general than that they practised in the Empire of Brazil. But in the time of which I write, in their own country they still carried swords, slaves trotted after the rich “fazendero’s” horse, the women of the family never sat down to table with the men, and if a stranger chanced to call on business at their house, they were as jealously kept from his eyes as they had all been Turks.

The “Fazenda” houses had great iron-studded doors, often a moat, and not infrequently a rusty cannon, though generally dismounted, and a relic of bygone time. The traveller fared, as a general rule, much worse than in the Banda Oriental, for save at the large cattle-farms it was impossible to buy a piece of meat. Admitted to the house, one rarely passed beyond the guest-chamber, a room with four bare white-washed walls; having for furniture a narrow hard-wood table with wrought-iron supports between its legs; chairs cut apparently out of the solid block, and a tin bucket or a large gourd in the corner, with drinking-water; so that one’s sojourn at the place was generally brief, and one’s departure a relief to all concerned. Still on the frontier the Gaucho influence made itself a little felt, and people were not so inhospitable as they were further in the interior of the land. Two or three leagues beyond the pass there was a little town called “Don Pedrito,” towards which we made; but a “Pampero,” whistling from the south, forced us to camp upon a stream known as the “Poncho Verde,” where, in the forties, Garibaldi was reported to have fought.

Wet to the skin and without food, we saw a fazenda not a mile away, rode up to it, and for a wonder were asked inside, had dinner in the guest-chamber, the owner sitting but not eating with us; the black Brazilian beans and bacon carried in pompously by three or four stalwart slaves, who puffed and sweated, trod on each other’s naked toes, and generally behaved as they had been carrying sacks of corn aboard a ship, only that in this instance no one stood in the gangway with a whip. Much did the conversation run on politics; upon “A Guerra dos Farapos,” which it appeared had riven the country in twain what time our host was young. Farapo means a rag, and the Republicans of fifty years ago in Rio Grande had adopted the device after the fashion of “Les gueux.” Long did they fight, and our host said: “Praise to God, infructuously,” for how could men who wore moustaches and full beards be compared to those who, like our host himself, wore whiskers carefully trimmed in the style of those which at the same epoch in our country were the trade-mark of the Iron Duke? Elective kings, for so the old “conservador” termed presidents, did not find favour in his eyes; and in religion too the “farapos” were seriously astray. They held the doctrine that all creeds should be allowed; which I once held myself, but now incline to the belief that a religion and a name should be bestowed at baptism, and that it should be constituted heresy of the worst kind, and punishable by a fine, to change or palter with either the name or the religion which our fathers have bestowed.

Politics over, we fell a-talking upon other lands; on Europe and England, Portugal, and as to whether “Rondon” was larger than Pelotas, or matters of that sort. Then our host inquired if in “Rondon” we did not use “la bosa,” and I not taking the thing up, he rose and stretching out his hands, set them revolving like a saw, and I then saw our supposed national pastime was what he meant; and told him that it was practised, held in repute, and marked us out as a people set apart; and that our greatness was largely founded on the exercise he had endeavoured to depict. We bade farewell, not having seen a woman, even a negress, about the place; but as we left, a rustling at the door showed that the snuff-and-butter-coloured sex had been observing us after the fashion practised in Morocco and in houses in the East. The hospitable “conservador” sent down a slave with a great basket full of oranges; and seated at the camp we ate at least three dozen, whilst the man waited patiently to take the basket back.

Night caught us in the open “camp,” a south wind blowing, and the drops congealing as they fell. Three of us muffled in ponchos rode round the horses, whilst the others crouched at the fire, and midnight come, the riders rode to the fire, and stretched on the wet mud slept fitfully, whilst the others took their place. Day came at last; and miserable we looked, wet, cold, and hungry, the fire black out, matches all damp, and nothing else to do but march till the sun rose and made life tolerable. Arrived at a small rancho we got off, and found the owner was a Spaniard from Navarre, married to a Brazilian woman. In mongrel Portuguese he bade us welcome; said he was no Brazilian, and that his house was ours, and hearing Spanish brightened up, and said in broken Spanish, mixed with Portuguese, that he could never learn that language, though he had passed a lifetime in the place. The country pleased him, and though he had an orange garden of some three acres in extent, though palms, mameyes and bananas grew around his door, he mourned for chestnuts, which he remembered in his youth, and said he recollected eating them whilst in Navarre, and that they were better than all the fruit of all Brazil; thinking, like Naaman, that Abana and Pharpar were better than all the waters of Israel, or rivers of Damascus; or perhaps moved in some mysterious way by the remembrance of the chestnut forests, the old grey stone-roofed houses, and the wind whistling through the pine woods of some wild valley of Navarre. At the old Spaniard’s house a difficulty cropped up with our men. I having told a man to catch a horse which looked a little wild, he answered he was not a horse-breaker, and I might ride the beast myself. I promptly did so, and asked him if he knew what a wild horse was, and if it was not true that horses which could be saddled without tying their hind legs were tame, and the rest laughing at him, he drew his knife, and running at me, found himself looking down the barrel of a pistol which my partner with some forethought had produced. This brought things to a crisis, and they all left us, with a hundred horses on our hands. Several Brazilians having volunteered, we took them, bought a tame horse accustomed to carry packs, procured a bullock, had it killed, and the meat “jerked”; and making bags out of the hide, filled them with food, for, as the Spaniard said, “in the country you intend to cross you might as well be amongst Moors, for even money will not serve to get a piece of beef.” A kindly soul the Spaniard, his name has long escaped me, still he was interesting as but the truly ignorant can ever be. The world to him was a great mystery, as it is even to those who know much more than he; but all the little landmarks of the narrow boundaries of his life he had by heart; and they sufficed him, as the great world itself cannot suffice those who, by living in its current, see its muddiness.

So one day told another, and each night found us on horseback riding round the drove. Through forest, over baking plain, up mountain paths, through marshes, splashing to the saddle-flaps, by lone “fazendas,” and again through herds of cattle dotting the plain for miles, we took our way. Little straw huts, each with a horse tied day and night before them, were our fairway marks. Day followed night without adventure but when a horse suddenly threw its rider and a Brazilian peon uncoiled his lasso, and with a jangling of spurs against the stirrups, sprang into life, and in a moment the long snaky rope flew through the air and settled round the runaway just underneath his ears. Once in a clearing, as we plodded on, climbing the last barrier of the mountain range, to emerge upon the district called “Encima de la Sierra,” a deer appeared jumping into the air, and coming down again on the same spot repeatedly, the Brazilians said that it was fighting with a snake, for “God has given such instinct to those beasts that they attack and kill all snakes, knowing that they are enemies of man.” [32] A scheme of the creation which, if held in its entirety, shows curious lacunÆ in the Creator’s mind, only to be bridged over by that faith which in itself makes all men equal, that is, of course, when they experience it and recognize its charm. So on a day we crossed the hills, rode through a wood, and came out on a plain at the far end of which a little town appeared.For about ten leagues in circumference the plain stretched out, walled in with woods, which here and there jutted out into it, forming islands and peninsulas. The flat-roofed town straggled along three flat and sandy streets; the little plaza, planted with mameyes and paraiso trees, served as a lounging-place by day, by night a caravanserai for negroes; in time of rain the streets were turned to streams, and poured their water into the plaza, which became a lake. At the west corner of the square was situated Cardozo’s store, the chief emporium, mart, and meeting-place (after the barber’s and the chemist’s) of the whole town. Two languid and yellow, hermaphroditic young Brazilians dressed in alpaca coats, white trousers, and patent leather boots dispensed the wares, whilst negroes ran about rolling in casks of flour, hogsheads of sugar, and bales of black tobacco from Bahia, or from MaranhÃo. Such exterior graces did the little town of the High Cross exhibit to us, wearied with the baking days and freezing nights of the last month’s campaign. Whether some Jesuit in the days gone by, when missionaries stood up before their catechumens unsustained by Gatling guns, sheltered but by a rude cross in their hands and their meek lives, had named the place, in commemoration of some saving act of grace done by Jehovah in the conversion of the heathen, none can tell. It may be that the Rood set up on high was but a landmark, or again to mark a frontier line against the heathen to the north, or yet it may have been the grave of some Paulista, who in his foray against the Jesuits in Paraguay died here on his return, whilst driving on before him a herd of converts to become slaves in far San Paulo, to the greater glory of the Lord. All these things may have been, or none of them; but the quiet sleepy place, the forests with their parrots and macaws, their herds of peccaries, their bands of screaming monkeys, the bright-striped tiger-cats, the armadillos, coatis, capibarÁs, and gorgeous flaming “seibos,” all intertwined by ropes of living cordage of lianas, and the supreme content of all the dwellers in the district, with God, themselves, their country, and their lives, still after twenty years is fresh, and stirs me, as the memory of the Pacific stirs a reclaimed “beach-comber” over his grog, and makes him say, “I never should have left them islands, for a man was happy in ’em, living on the beach.”

To this commercial centre (centro do commercio) we were advised to go, and there I rode, leaving my partner with the peons riding round the caballada upon the plains. Dressed as I was in the clothes worn by the Gauchos of the Banda Oriental, a hat tied underneath the chin with a black cord, a vicuÑa poncho, and armed with large resounding silver spurs, I made a blot of colour in Cardozo’s shop amongst the quietly dressed Brazilians, who, though they were some of the smartest men in South America upon a horse, were always clad in sober-coloured raiment, wore ordinary store-cut trousers, and had their feet endued with all the graces of a five-dollar elastic-sided boot.

Half-an-hour’s talk with the chief partner shattered all our plans. It then appeared that to take horses on to Rio was impossible, the country, after San Paulo, being one dense forest, and even if the horses stood the change of climate, the trip would take a year, thus running off with any profit which we might expect. Moreover, it appeared that mules were in demand throughout Brazil, but horses, till past San Paulo, five hundred miles ahead, but little valued, and almost as cheap, though much inferior in breed to those bred on the plains of Uruguay. He further told us to lose not a day in teaching all the horses to eat salt, for without that they would not live a month, as once the range of mountains passed between Cruz Alta and the plains, no horse or mule could live without its three months’ ration of rock-salt; there being in the pasture some malign quality which salt alone could cure. Naturally he had the cheapest salt in the whole town, and as our horses were by this time so thin that it was quite impossible to take them further without rest, they having been a month upon the road, we set about to find an enclosed pasture where we could let them feed.Xavier Fernandez, a retired slave- and mule-dealer, was the man on whom by accident we fell. Riding about the plain disconsolately, like Arabs changing their pastures, and with our horses feeding near a little pond, we met him. An old straw hat, bed-ticking trousers, and with his naked feet shoved into slippers of carpindo leather, and an iron spur attached to one of them and hanging down at least an inch below his heel, mounted upon a mule saddled with the iron-framed Brazilian saddle, with the addition of a crupper, a thing strange to our eyes, accustomed to the wild horses of the plains, he did not look the type of “landed gentleman,” but such he was, owner of flocks and herds, and, in particular, of a well-fenced pasture, enclosing about two leagues of land.

After much talk of things in general, of politics, and of the revolution in progress in the republic we had left, upon our folly in bringing horses, which could go no further into the interior, and of the money we should have made had we brought “bestas,” that is, mules, we agreed to pay him so much a month for the use of his fenced pasture, and for our maintenance during the time we stayed. Leaving the horses feeding, watched by the men, we rode to see the place. Upon the way Xavier imparted much of history, a good deal of his lore, and curious local information about Cruz Alta, duly distorted, as befits a reputable man, through the perspective of his predilections, politics, faith, opinions, and general view of life.

We learned that once Cruz Alta was a most important place, that six-and-thirty thousand mules used to be wintered there, and then in spring moved on to the great fair at Surucuba in the SertÃo, that is the forest district of San Paulo, and then sold to the merchants from the upper districts of Brazil. But of late years the number had been much reduced, and then stood at about twelve thousand. This he set down to the accursed steamboats which took them up the coast, to the continual fighting in the state of Uruguay, and generally to the degeneration which he thought he saw in man. In the heyday of the prosperity of the place “gold flowed from every hand,” so much so, that even “as mulheres da vida” kept their accounts in ounces; but now money was scarce, and business done in general by barter, coin being hardly even seen except for mules, for which it was imperative, as no one parted with “bestas” except for money down. Passing a little wood we saw a row of stakes driven into the ground, and he informed us that they were evidently left by some Birivas, that is people from San Paulo, after having used them to secure their mules whilst saddling. The Paulistas, we then learned, used the “sirigote,” that is, the old-fashioned high-peaked saddle brought from Portugal in times gone by, and not the “recado,” the saddle of the Gauchos, which is flat, and suited better for galloping upon a plain than for long marches over mountain passes and through woods. All the points, qualities, with the shortcomings and the failings of a mule, he did rehearse. It then appeared a mule should be mouse-coloured, for the red-coloured mule is of no use, the grey soft-footed, and the black bad-tempered, the piebald fit “for a German,” which kind of folk he held in abhorrence mixed with contempt, saying they whined in speaking as it had been the whining of an armadillo or a sloth. The perfect mule should be large-headed, not with a little-hammer head like to a horse, but long and thin, with ears erect, round feet, and upon no account when spurred ought it to whisk its tail, for that was most unseemly, fit but for Germans, Negroes, Indians, and generally for all those he counted senseless people—“gente sem razÃo”; saying “of course all men are of one flesh, but some are dog’s flesh, and let them ride mules who whisk about their tails like cattle in a marsh.” Beguiled by these, and other stories, we soon reached the gate of the enclosure, and he, dismounting, drew a key from one of the pockets of his belt and let us in. A short half-hour brought us up to his house, passing through ground all overgrown with miamia and other shrubs which did not promise to afford much pasturage; but he informed us that we must not expect the grasses of the plains up at Cruz Alta, and thus conversing we arrived before his house.Surrounded by a fence enclosing about an acre, the house stood just on the edge of a thick wood. On one side were the corrals for horses and for cattle, and on the other the quarters of the slaves. In shape the houses resembled a flattish haystack thatched with reeds, and with a verandah rising round it, supported on strong posts. At either end a kind of baldachino, one used as a stable and the other as a kitchen, and in the latter a fire continually alight, and squatted by it night and day a negress, either baking flat, thin girdle-cakes made of maize, shaking the flour out of her hand upon an iron plate, or else filling a gourd of matÉ with hot water, and running to and fro into the house to give it to her mistress, never apparently thinking it worth while to take the kettle with her into the house.

The family, not quite so white as Xavier himself, consisted of a mother always in slippers, dressed in a skirt and shift, which latter garment always seemed about to fall down to her waist, and two thin, large-eyed, yellowish girls arrayed in vestments like a pillow-case, with a string fastening them at the narrowest place. Slave girls of several hues did nothing and chattered volubly, and their mistress had to stand over them, a slipper in her hand, when maize was pounded in a rough mortar hewn from a solid log, in which the slaves hammered with pestles, one down, the other up, after the fashion of blacksmiths making a horsehoe, but with groans, and making believe to be extenuated after three minutes’ work, and stopping instantly the moment that their mistress went into the house to light her cigarette.

An official in Cruz Alta, known as the CapitÃo do Matto, holding a status between a gamekeeper and a parish clerk, kept by the virtue of his office a whipping-house, to which recalcitrant or idle slaves were theoretically sent; but in the house of Xavier at least no one took interest enough in anything, except Xavier himself, to take the trouble; and the slaves ruled the female part of the establishment, if not exactly with a rod of iron, still to their perfect satisfaction, cooking and sewing now and then; sweeping, but fitfully; and washing when they wanted to look smart and figure at a dance. The CapitÃo do Matto was supposed to bring back runaways and keep a leash of bloodhounds, but in the memory of man no one had seen him sally forth, and for the blood-hounds, they were long dead, although he drew regular rations for their maintenance. In the interior of Brazil his office was no sinecure, but in Cruz Alta horses were plentiful, the country relatively easy, and slaves who ran away, which happened seldom, timed their escape so as to put a good day’s journey between them and any possible pursuit, and on the evening of the fifth day, if all went well, they got across the frontier into Uruguay.

Terms once arranged, we let our horses loose, laid out rock-salt in lumps, first catching several of the tamest horses, and forcing pieces into their mouths; they taught the others, and we had nothing more to do. We paid our peons off, got our clothes washed, rested, and then found time at first hang heavy on our hands. Hearing an Englishman lived about ten leagues off, we saddled up and rode to visit him. After losing ourselves in a thick forest of some kind of pine, we reached his house, but the soi-disant Briton was from Amsterdam, could speak no English, was a little drunk, but asked us to get off and dine with him. During the dinner, which we had all alone, his wife and daughter standing looking at us (he too drunk to eat), pigs ran into the room, a half-grown tapir lay in a corner, and two new-caught macaws screamed horribly, so that, the banquet over, we did not stay, but thanked him in Portuguese, which he spoke badly, and rode off home, determining to sleep at the first wood, rather than face a night in such a place.

The evening caught us near to a forest, the trail, sandy and white, running close to a sort of cove formed in the trees, and here we camped, taking our saddles off, lighting a fire, and lying down to sleep just in the opening of the cove, our horses tied inside. All through the night people appeared to pass along the road. I lay awake half-dozing now and then, and watched the bats, looked at the fire-flies flitting about the trees, heard the harsh howling of the monkeys, the tapirs stamp, the splash made by the lobos and carpinchos as they dashed into the stream, and then slept soundly, and awoke to find one of the horses gone. The moon shone brightly, and, waking up my friend, I told him of our loss. We knew the horse must have a rope attached to him, and that he probably would try to get back to Cruz Alta, along the road we came. My horse was difficult to bit, but by the aid of tying up one foot, and covering his eyes up with a handkerchief, we bitted him, then mounted both of us upon his back, hiding the other saddle behind some grass, and started on the road. The sandy trail was full of horses’ tracks, so that we could do nothing but ride on, hoping to catch him feeding by the way. About a league we rode, and then, not seeing him, turned slowly back to get the other saddle, make some coffee, and start home when it was light. To our astonishment, upon arriving at the cove, the other horse was there, and neighing wildly, straining on his rope, and it appeared that he had never gone, but being tied close to the wood had wandered in, and we, thinking he must have gone, being half-dazed with sleep, had never thought of looking at his rope.

Defrauded, so to speak, out of our Englishman, and finding that the horses, after the long journey and the change of water and of grass, daily grew thinner, making it quite impossible to move them, forwards or back, and after having vainly tried to sell them, change them for mules, or sugar, quite without success, no one except some “fazendero” here and there caring for horses in a land where every one rode mules, we settled down to loaf. Once certain we had lost our money and our pains, nothing remained but to wait patiently until the horses got into sufficient state to sell, for all assured us that every day we went further into the interior, they would lose flesh, that we should have them bitten by snakes in the forests, and arrive at Rio, if we ever got there, either on foot, or with but the horses which we rode.

For a short time we had almost determined to push on, even if we arrived at Rio with but a horse apiece. Then came reflection, that reflection which has dressed the world in drab, made cowards of so many heroes, lost so many generous impulses, spoiled so many poems, and which mankind has therefore made a god of, and we decided to remain. Then did Cruz Alta put on a new look. We saw the wondrous vegetation of the woods, felt the full charm of the old-world quiet life, watched the strange multi-coloured insects, lay by the streams to mark the birds, listened for the howlings of the monkeys when night fell; picked the strange flowers, admired the butterflies floating like little blue and yellow albatrosses, their wings opened and poised in the still air, or wondered when a topaz-coloured humming-bird, a red macaw, an orange-and-black toucan, or a red-crested cardinal flitted across our path. Inside the wood behind the house were clearings, made partly by the axe and partly by fire, amongst the tall morosimos, coronillos, and palo santos, and in the clearings known as “roÇas” grew beans and maize, with mandioca and occasionally barley, and round them ran a prickly hedge either of cactuses or thorny bush, cut down to keep out tapirs and deer, and usually in a straw hut a negro lay, armed with a flint-lock gun to fire at parrots, scare off monkeys, and generally to act as guardian of the place. Orange and lemon trees, with citrons and sweet limes, grew plentifully, and had run wild amongst the woods; bananas were planted in the roÇa; but what we liked the best was a wild fruit called Guavirami, which grew in patches on the open camp, yellow and round, about the size of a small plum, low-growing, having three or four small stones, cold as an icicle to taste upon the hottest day. A little river ran through the middle of the wood, and in a stream a curious machine was placed for pounding maize, driven by water-power, and unlike any contrivance of a similar nature I had ever seen before. An upright block of wood, burned from the centre of a tree, stood in the stream, hollowed out in the centre to contain the maize; water ran up a little channel, and released a pestle, which fell with a heavy thud upon the corn, with the result that if one left a basket full in the great mortar over-night, by morning it was pounded, saving that labour which God Himself seems to have thought not so ennobling after all, as He first instituted it to carry out a curse.

So one day told, and may, for all I know, have certified another, but we recked little of them, riding into Cruz Alta now and then and eating cakes at the confectioner’s, drinking innumerable glasses of sweet Malaga, laying in stores of cigarettes, frequenting all the dances far and near, joining in cattle-markings, races, and anything in short which happened in the place.

Perhaps our greatest friend was one Luis, a slave, born in Angola, brought over quite “Bozal” (or muzzled, as the Brazilians say of negroes who can speak no Portuguese), then by degrees became “ladino,” was baptized, bought by our host Xavier, and had remained with him all the remainder of his life. Black, and not comely in the least, bowlegged from constant riding, nose flat, and ears like flappers, a row of teeth almost as strong as a young shark’s, flat feet, and crisp Angola wool which grew so thickly on his head that had you thrown a pin on it, it could not have reached the skin, he yet was honest and faithful to the verge of folly; but then, if heaven there be, it can be but inhabited by fools, for wise men, prudent folk, and those who thrive, have their reward like singers, quickly, and can look for nothing more. He spoke about himself half-pityingly under the style of “Luis o Captivo,” was pious, fervent in sacred song, instant in prayer (especially if work was to be done), not idle either, superstitious and affectionate with all the virtues of the most excellent Saint Bernard or Newfoundland dog, and with but little of the imperfections of a man except the power of speech. Often he had been with his master into Uruguay to purchase cattle, or to buy mules for the Brazilian market, and when I asked him if he did not know that he was free the instant that he stepped in Uruguay, said: “Yes, but here I was brought up when I first came from Africa; they have been kind to me, it is to me as the querencia [46] is to a horse, and were it not for that, small fear I should return, to remain here ‘feito captivo’; but then I love the place, and, as you know, ‘the mangy calf lived all the winter, and then died in the spring.’” He held the Christian faith in its entirety, doubting no dogma, being pleased with every saint, but yet still hankered after fetish, which he remembered as a child, and seemed to think not incompatible with Christianity, as rendering it more animistic and familiar, smoothing away its angularities, blotting whatever share of reason it may have away, and, above all, giving more scope, if possible, to faith, and thereby opening a larger field of possibilities to the believer’s mind.

So Luis with others of his kind, as Jango, Jico, and Manduco, became our friends, looking upon us with that respect mixed with contempt which is the attitude of those who see that you possess the mysterious arts of reading and of writing, but cannot see a horse’s footprint on hard ground; or if you lose yourself, have to avail yourself of what Luis referred to as “the one-handed watch the sailors use, which points the way to go.”

Much did Xavier talk of the Indians of the woods, the “Bugres,” as the Brazilians call them; about the “Botocudos,” who wear a plug stuck in their lower lip, and shape their ears with heavy weights in youth, so that they hang upon their shoulders; and much about those “Infidel” who through a blowpipe direct a little arrow at the travelling “Christians” in the woods, whose smallest touch is death. It then appeared his father (fica agora na gloria) was a patriot, that is, ’twas he who extirpated the last of all the “Infidel” from the forests where they lived. Most graphically did he tell how the last Indians were hunted down with dogs, and in a pantomime he showed how they jumped up and fell when they received the shot, and putting out his tongue and writhing hideously, he imitated how they wriggled on the ground, explaining that they were worse to kill than is a tapir, and put his father and the other patriots to much unnecessary pain. And as he talked, the woods, the fields, the river and the plain bathed in the sun, which unlike that of Africa does not seem weary of its task, but shines unwearied, looking as it does on a new world and life, shimmered and blazed, great lizards drank its rays flattening themselves upon the stones in ecstasy, humming-birds quivered at the heart of every flower; above the stream the dragon-flies hung poised; only some “Infidel” whom the patriots had destroyed seemed wanting, and the landscape looked incomplete without a knot of them in their high feather crowns stealthily stealing round a corner of the woods.

In the uncomprehended future, incomprehensible and strange, and harder far to guess at than the remotest semi-comprehended past, surely the Spanish travellers and their writings will have a value quite apart from that of any other books. For then the world will hold no “Bugres”; not a “Botocudo” will be left, and those few Indian and Negro tribes who yet persist will be but mere travesties of the whites: their customs lost, their lore, such as it was, despised; and we have proved ourselves wiser than the Creator, who wasted so much time creating beings whom we judged unfit to live, and then, in mercy to ourselves and Him, destroyed, so that no evidence of His miscalculated plan should last to shame Him when He thought of His mistake. So to this end (unknowingly) the missionary works, and all the Jesuits, those who from Paraguay through the Chiquitos, and across the Uruguay, in the dark Moxos, and in the forests of the Andes, gave their lives to bring as they thought life everlasting to the Indians—all were fools. Better by far instead of Bibles, lives of saints, water of baptism, crucifixes, and all the tackle of their trade, that they had brought swords, lances, and a good cross-bow each, and gone to work in the true scientific way, and recognized that the right way with savages is to preach heaven to them and then despatch them to it, for it is barbarous to keep them standing waiting as it were, just at the portals of eternal bliss.

And as we lingered at Cruz Alta, Christmas drew near, and all the people began to make “pesebres,” with ox and ass, the three wise men, the star of Bethlehem, the Redeemer (not of the Botocudos and the Bugres) swaddled and laid in straw. Herdsmen and negroes dismounted at the door, fastened their half-wild mules or horses carefully to posts, removed their hats, drawing them down over their faces furtively, and then walked in on tiptoe, their heavy iron spurs clanking upon the ground, to see the Wondrous Child. They lounged about the room, speaking in whispers as he might awake, and then departed silently, murmuring that it was “fermosisimo,” and getting on their horses noiselessly were gone, and in a minute disappeared upon the plain. Then came the Novena with prayer and carols, the prayers read by Xavier himself out of a tattered book, all the assembled family joining with unction in the responses, and beating on their breasts. Luis and all the slaves joined in the carols lustily, especially in one sung in a minor key long-drawn-out as a sailor’s shanty, or a forebitter sung in a calm whilst waiting for a breeze. After each verse there was a kind of chorus calling upon the sinner to repent, bidding him have no fear but still hold on, and thus exhorting him—

“Chegai, Chegai, pecador, Áo pe da cruz
Fica nosso Senhor.”

Christmas Day found us all at mass in the little church, horses and mules being tied outside the door to the trees in the plaza, and some left hobbled, and all waiting as if St. Hubert was about to issue forth and bless them.

Painfully and long, the preacher dwelt upon the glorious day, the country people listening as it were new to them, and as if all the events had happened on the plain hard by. In the evening rockets announced the joyful news, and the stars shone out over the woods and plains as on the evening when the bright particular star guided the three sheikhs to some such place as was the rancho of our host.

Christmas rejoicings over, a month sped past and found us still, so to speak, wind-bound in the little town. No one would buy our horses, some of which died bitten by snakes. It was impossible to think of going on, and to return equally difficult, so that there seemed a probability of being obliged to pass a lifetime in the place. People began to look at us half in a kindly, half contemptuous way, as people look in general upon those who fail, especially when they themselves have never tried to do anything at all but live, and having done it with considerable success look upon failure as a sort of minor crime, to be atoned for by humility, and to be reprobated after the fashion of adultery, with a half-deprecating laugh. Sometimes we borrowed ancient flint-lock guns and lay in wait for tapirs, but never saw them, as in the thick woods they move as silently as moles in sand, and leave as little trace. Luis told of how, mounted on a half-wild horse, he had long ago lassoed a tapir, and found himself and horse dragged slowly and invincibly towards a stream, the horse resisting terrified, the “gran besta” [51] apparently quite cool, so that at last he had to cut his lasso and escape from what he called the greatest peril of his life; he thought he was preserved partly by the interposition of the saints and partly by a “fetiÇo” which, in defiance of religion, he luckily had hanging round his neck.

Just when all hope was gone, and we thought seriously of leaving the horses to their fate, and pushing on with some of the best of them towards Rio, a man appeared upon the scene, and offered to buy them, half for money and half “a troco,” that is barter, for it appeared he was a pawnbroker and had a house full of silver horse-gear, which had never been redeemed. After much bargaining we closed for three hundred dollars and a lot of silver bridles, spurs, whips, and other stuff, after reserving four of the best horses for ourselves to make our journey back. At the head of so much capital our spirits rose, and we determined to push on to Paraguay, crossing the Uruguay and Parana, ride through the Misiones, and at Asuncion, where I had friends, take ship; aguas abajo, for the River Plate. We paid our debts and bid good-bye to Xavier, his wife and sallow daughters, and to all the slaves; gave Luis a silver-mounted whip, bought some provisions, put on our silver spurs, bridles, and as much as possible of the silver gear we had become possessed of, and at daybreak, mounted upon a cream-and-white piebald, the “Bayo Overo,” and a red bay known as the “Pateador,” leading a horse apiece, we passed out of Xavier’s “potrero,” [52] and started on the road.

During the last few days at Xavier’s we had taught the horses we intended to take to Paraguay to eat Indian corn, fastening them up without any other food all day, and putting salt into their mouths. The art once learnt, we had to stand beside them whilst they ate, to keep off chickens and pigs who drove them from their food, the horses being too stupid to help themselves. If I remember rightly, their ration was eight cobs, which we husked for them in our hands, blistering our fingers in the process as they had been burned. But now the trouble of the process was repaid, the horses going strongly all day long. We passed out of the little plain, skirted a pine-wood, rode up a little hill, and saw the country stretching towards the Uruguay, a park-like prairie interspersed with trees. Cruz Alta, a white patch shining against the green-grey plain encircled with its woods, was just in sight, the church-tower standing like a needle in the clear air against the sky. Half a league more and it dropped out of view, closing the door upon a sort of half Boeotian Arcady, but remaining still a memory after twenty years, with all the little incidents of the three months’ sojourn in the place fresh, and yet seeming as they had happened not to myself, but to a person I had met, and who had told the tale.

By easy stages we journeyed on, descending gradually towards the Uruguay, passing through country almost unpopulated, so large were the “fazendas,” and so little stocked. In the last century the Jesuits had here collected many tribes of Indians, and their history, is it not told in the pages of Montoya Lozano, Padre Guevara, and the other chroniclers of the doings of the “Company,” and to be read in the Archivo de Simancas, in that of Seville, and the uncatalogued “legajos” of the national library at Madrid? Throughout the country that we passed through, the fierce Paulistas had raided in times gone by, carrying off the Christian Indians to be slaves. The Portuguese and Spaniards had often fought—witness the names “O matto [54a] Portogues, O matto Castelhano,” and the like, showing where armies had manoeuvred, whilst the poor Indians waited like sheep, rejoicing when the butchers turned the knife at one another’s throats. To-day all trace of Jesuits and Missions have long disappeared, save for a ruined church or two, and here and there a grassy mound called in the language of the country a “tapera,” [54b] showing where a settlement had stood.

We camped at lonely ranchos inhabited, in general, by free negroes, or by the side of woods, choosing, if possible, some little cove in the wood, in which we tied the horses, building a fire in the mouth, laid down and slept, after concocting a vile beverage bought in Cruz Alta under the name of tea, but made I think of birch-leaves, and moistening pieces of the hard jerked beef in orange-juice to make it palatable.

So after five or six days of steady travelling, meeting, if I remember rightly, not a living soul upon the way, except a Gaucho from the Banda Oriental, who one night came to our fire, and seeing the horrible brew of tea in a tin-pot asked for a little of the “black water,” not knowing what it was, we reached the Uruguay. The river, nearly half-a-mile in breadth, flowed sluggishly between primeval woods, great alligators basked with their backs awash, flamingoes fished among the shallow pools, herons and cranes sat on dead stumps, vultures innumerable perched on trees, and in the purple bunches of the “seibos” humming-birds seemed to nestle, so rapid was their flight, and over all a darkish vapour hung, blending the trees and water into one, and making the “balsa,” as it laboured over after repeated calls, look like the barque of Styx. Upon the other side lay Corrientes, once a vast mission territory, but to-day, in the narrow upper portion that we traversed, almost a desert, that is a desert of tall grass with islands of timber dotted here and there, and an occasional band of ostriches scudding across the plain.

Camped by a wood about a quarter of a league from a lonely rancho, we were astonished, just at even-fall, by the arrival of the owner of the house mounted upon a half-wild horse, a spear in his hand, escorted by his two ragged sons mounted on half-wild ponies, and holding in their hands long canes to which a broken sheep-shear had been fixed. The object of his visit, as he said, was to inquire if we had seen a tiger which had killed some sheep, but his suspicious glance made me think he thought we had designs upon his cattle, and he had come to reconnoitre us; but our offer of some of the Cruz Alta tea soon made us friends, and after drinking almost a quart of it, he said “Muy rico,” and rode back to his house.

The third day’s riding brought us to the little town of Candelaria, built on a high bank over the Parana. Founded on Candlemas Day in 1665, it was the chief town of the Jesuit missions. Here, usually, the “Provincial” [56a] resided, and here the political business of their enormous territory was done. Stretching almost from Cruz Alta to within fifty leagues of Asuncion del Paraguay, and from YapeyÚ upon the Uruguay almost to the “Salto de Guayra” upon the Parana, the territory embraced an area larger than many a kingdom, and was administered without an army, solely by about two hundred priests. The best proof of the success of their administration is that in these days the Indians, now to be numbered by a few thousand, were estimated at about two hundred thousand, and peopled all the country now left desolate, or which at least was desolate at the time of which I write. Even Azara, [56b] a bitter opponent of their system, writes of the Jesuit rule—“Although the Fathers had supreme command, they used their power with a gentleness and moderation which one cannot but admire.” [56c]I leave to the economists, with all the reverend rabble rout of politicians, statistic-mongers and philanthropists, whether or not two hundred thousand living Indians were an asset in the world’s property; and to the pious I put this question, If, as I suppose, these men had souls just as immortal as our own, might it not have been better to preserve their bodies, those earthly envelopes without which no soul can live, rather than by exposing them to all those influences which the Jesuits dreaded, to kill them off, and leave their country without population for a hundred years?

But at the time of which I write neither my partner nor I cared much for speculations of that kind, but were more occupied with the condition of our horses, for, by that time, the “Bayo Overo” and the “Pateador” were become part and parcel of ourselves, and we thought more about their welfare than that of all the Indians upon earth.

La Candelaria, at the time when we passed through, was fallen from its proud estate, and had become a little Gaucho country town with sandy streets and horses tied at every door—a barren sun-burnt plaza, with a few Japanese ash-trees and Paraisos; the “Commandancia” with the Argentine blue-and-white barred flag, and trade-mark rising sun, hanging down listlessly against the post, and for all remnants of the Jesuit sway, the college turned into a town-hall, and the fine church, which seemed to mourn over the godless, careless, semi-Gaucho population in the streets. Here we disposed of our spare horses, bidding them good-bye, as they had been old friends, and got the “Bayo Overo” and the “Pateador” shod for the first time in their lives, an operation which took the united strength of half-a-dozen men to achieve, but was imperative, as their feet, accustomed to the stone-less plains of Paraguay, had suffered greatly in the mountain paths. In Candelaria, for the first time for many months, we sat down to a regular meal, in a building called “El Hotel Internacional”; drank wine of a suspicious kind, and seemed to have arrived in Paris, so great the change to the wild camps beside the forests, or the nights passed in the lone ranchos of the hilly district of Brazil.

A balsa drawn by a tug-boat took us across the Parana, here more than a mile broad, to Ytapua, and upon landing we found ourselves in quite another world. The little Paraguayan town of Ytapua, called by the Jesuits Encarnacion, lay, with its little port below it (where my friend Enrico Clerici had his store), upon a plateau hanging above the stream. The houses, built of canes and thatched with straw, differed extremely from the white “azotea” houses of the Candelaria on the other side. The people, dress, the vegetation, and the mode of life, differed still more in every aspect. The Paraguayan, with his shirt hanging outside his white duck trousers, bare feet, and cloak made of red cloth or baize, his broad straw hat and quiet manner, was the complete antithesis of the high-booted, loose-trousered, poncho-wearing Correntino, with his long knife and swaggering Gaucho air. The one a horseman of the plains, the other a footman of the forests; the Correntino brave even to rashness when taken man for man, but so incapable of discipline as to be practically useless as a soldier. The other as quiet as a sheep, and individually patient even to suffering blows, but once gathered together and instructed in the use of arms, as good a soldier, when well led, as it is possible to find; active and temperate, brave, and, if rather unintelligent, eager to risk his life at any time at the command of any of his chiefs. Such was the material from which Lopez, coward and grossly incompetent as he was, formed the battalions which for four years kept both Buenos Ayres and Brazil at bay, and only yielded when he himself was killed, mounted, as tradition has it, on the last horse of native breed left in the land.

But if the people and their dwellings were dissimilar, the countries in themselves were to the full at least as different. All through the upper part of Corrientes the soil is black, and the country open, park-like prairie dotted with trees; in Ytapua and the surrounding district, the earth bright red, and the primeval forest stretches close to the water’s edge. In Corrientes still the trees of the Pampas are occasionally seen, Talas and Ñandubay with Coronillo and Lapacho; whereas in Paraguay, as by a bound, you pass to Curupay, [60a] TatanÉ, [60b] the TarumÁ, [60c] the ÑandipÁ, [60d] the Jacaranda, and the Paratodo with its bright yellow flowers; whilst upon every tree lianas cling with orchidaceÆ, known to the natives as “flowers of the air,” and through them all flit great butterflies, humming-birds dart, and underneath the damp vegetation of the sub-tropics, emphorbiaceÆ, solanaceÆ, myrtaceÆ, and flowers and plants to drive a thousand botanists to madness, blossom and die unnamed. Here, too, the language changed, and Guarani became the dominant tongue, which, though spoken in Corrientes, is there used but occasionally, but among Paraguayans is their native speech, only the Alcaldes, officers, and upper classes as a general rule (at that time) speaking Spanish, and even then with a strange accent and much mixed with Guarani.

Two days we passed in Ytapua resting our horses, and I renewed my friendship with Enrico Clerici, an Italian, who had served with Garibaldi, and who, three years ago, I had met in the same place and given him a silver ring which he reported galvanized, and was accustomed to lend as a great favour for a specific against rheumatism. He kept a pulperia, and being a born fighter, his delight was, when a row occurred (which he styled “una barulla de Jesu Cristo”), to clear the place by flinging empty bottles from the bar. A handsome, gentlemanlike man, and terrible with a bottle in his hand, whether as weapon of offence or for the purposes of drink; withal well educated, and no doubt by this time long dead, slain by his favourite weapon, and his place filled by some fat, double-entry Basque or grasping Catalan, or by some portly emigrant from Germany.

Not wishing to be confined within a house, a prey to the mosquitoes, we camped in the chief square, and strolling round about the town, I came on an old friend.

Not far outside the village a Correntino butcher had his shop, a little straw-thatched hut, with strings of fresh jerked beef festooning all the place; the owner stood outside dressed in the costume of a Gaucho of the southern plains. I did not know him, and we began to talk, when I perceived, tied underneath a shed, a fine, dark chestnut horse, saddled and bitted in the most approved of Gaucho style. He somehow seemed familiar, and the Correntino, seeing me looking at his horse, asked if I knew the brand, but looking at it I failed to recognize it, when on a sudden my memory was lighted up. Three years ago, in an “estero” [62] outside CaapucÚ, at night, journeying in company with a friend, one Hermann, whose only means of communication with me was a jargon of Spanish mixed with “Plaat Deutsch,” we met a Correntino, and as our horses mutually drowned our approach by splashing with their feet, our meeting terrified us both. Frightened, he drew his knife, and I a pistol, and Hermann lugged out a rusty sword, which he wore stuck through his horse’s girths. But explanations followed, and no blood was shed, and then we drew aside into a little hillock, called in the language of the place an “albardon,” sat down and talked, and asking whence he came was told from Ytapua. Now Ytapua was three days’ journey distant on an ordinary horse, and I looked carefully at the horse, and wondered why his owner had ridden him so hard. He, I now saw, was the horse I had seen that night, and the Correntino recognized me, and laughing said he had killed a man near Ytapua, and was (as he said) “retreating” when he met me in the marsh. The horse, no doubt, was one of the best for a long journey I have ever seen, and after quoting to his owner that “a dark chestnut horse may die, but cannot tire,” [63a] we separated, and, no doubt, for years afterwards our meeting was the subject of his talk.

No doubt the citizens of Ytapua were scandalized at our not coming to the town, and the Alcalde came to interview us, but we assured him that in virtue of a vow we slept outside, and in a moment all his fears were gone.

Striking right through the then desolated Misiones, passing the river Aguapey, our horses almost swimming, skirting by forests where red macaws hovered like hawks and parrots chattered; passing through open plains grown over here and there with Yatais, [63b] splashing for hours through wet esteros, missing the road occasionally, as I had travelled it but once, and then three years ago, and at the time I write of huts were few and far between, and population scanty, we came, upon the evening of the second day, near to a place called Ñacuti. This was the point for which I had been making, for near it was an estancia [63c] called the “Potrero San Antonio,” the property of Dr. Stewart, a well-known man in Paraguay. Nature had seemed to work to make the place impregnable. On three sides of the land, which measured eight or ten miles in length on every side, forks of a river ran, and at the fourth they came so close together that a short fence, not half-a-mile in length, closed up the circle, and cattle once inside were safe but for the tigers, which at that time abounded, and had grown so fierce by reason of the want of population that they sometimes killed horses or cows close to the door of the house. A short “picada,” of about a quarter of a mile in length, cut through the wood, led to the gate. Through it in times gone by I often rode at night in terror, with a pistol in my hand, the heavy foliage of the trees brushing my hat, and thinking every instant that a tiger would jump out. One night when close up to the bamboo bars I heard a grunt, thought my last hour had come, fired, and brought something down; approached, and found it was a peccary; and then, tearing the bars down in a hurry, got to horse, and galloped nine miles to the house, thinking each moment that the herd of peccaries was close behind and panting for my blood.

On this occasion all was still; the passage through the orange trees was dark, their scent oppressive, as the leaves just stirred in the hot north wind, and fire-flies glistened to and fro amongst the flowers; great bats flew heavily, and the quarter of a mile seemed mortal, and as if it led to hell.

Nothing occurred, and coming to the bars we found them on the ground; putting them up we conscientiously cursed the fool who left them out of place, and riding out into the moonlight, after a little trouble found the sandy, deep-banked trail which led up to the house. All the nine miles we passed by islands of great woods, peninsulas and archipelagos jutting out into the still plain, and all their bases swathed in white mists like water: the Yatais looked ghostly standing starkly in the grass; from the lagoons came the shrill croak of frogs, great moths came fluttering across our path, and the whole woods seemed filled with noise, as if the dwellers in them, silent through the day, were keeping holiday at night. As for the past two days we had eaten nothing but a few oranges and pieces of jerked beef, moistening them in the muddy water of the streams, our talk was of the welcome we should get, the supper, and of the comfortable time we then should pass for a few days to give our horses rest.

We passed the tiger-trap, a structure built after the fashion of an enormous mouse-trap, of strong bamboos; skirted along a wood in which an ominous growling and rustling made our horses start, and then it struck me as curious that there were no cattle feeding in the plain, no horses, and that the whole potrero seemed strangely desolate; but the house just showing at the edge of a small grove of peach-trees drove all these speculations out of my head: thinking upon the welcome, and the dinner, for we had eaten nothing since daybreak, and were fasting, as the natives say, from everything but sin, we reached the door. The house was dark, no troop of dogs rushed out to bark and seize our horses’ tails; we shouted, hammered with our whips, fired our revolvers, and nothing answered us.

Dismounting, we found everything bolted and barred, and going to the back, on the kitchen-hearth a few red embers, and thus knew that some one had been lately in the place. Nothing to eat, the woods evidently full of tigers, and our horses far too tired to start again, we were just about to unsaddle and lie down and sleep, when a white figure stole out from the peach-trees, and tried to gain the shelter of the corral some sixty yards away. Jumping on horseback we gave chase, and coming up with the fugitive found it to be a Paraguayan woman, who with her little daughter were the sole inhabitants, her husband having gone to the nearest village to buy provisions, and left her all alone, warning her earnestly before he left to keep the doors shut during the night on account of the tigers, and not to venture near the woods even in daylight till he should have come back. Finding herself confronted by two armed, mounted men, dressed in the clothes of Correntinos, who had an evil reputation in Paraguay, her terror was extreme. Her daughter, a little girl of eight or nine, crept out from behind a tree, and in a moment we were friends. Unluckily for us, she had no food of any kind, and but a little matÉ, which she prepared for us. She then remembered that the trees were covered with peaches, and went out and gathered some, but they were hard as stones; nevertheless we ate a quantity of them, and having tied our horses close to the house, not twenty paces from the door, in long lush grass, we lay down in the verandah, and did not wake till it was almost noon. When we awoke we found the woman had been up betimes and gone on foot five or six miles away to look for food. She brought some mandioca, and two or three dozen oranges, and a piece of almost putrefied jerked beef, all which we ate as heartily as if it had been the most delicious food on earth.

To my annoyance I found my horse weak and dejected, and several large clots of dried-up blood under the hair of his mane, and saw at once a vampire bat had fixed upon him, and no doubt sucked almost a quart of blood. We washed him in a pond close to the house, and he got better, and after eating some of the hard and unripe peaches we again lay down to sleep. By evening the woman’s husband had returned, and proved to be a little lame and withered-looking man, mounted upon a lean and skinny horse. He undertook to guide us to Asuncion, remarking that it was twenty years since he had seen the capital, but that he knew the road as if he was accustomed to go there every day. With a slight lapsus this turned out to be the case, and just at daybreak we left the Potrero San Antonio, where once before I had passed a month roaming about the woods, waiting for tigers in a tree at night, and never thinking that, in three years’ time, I should return and find it desolate. It seemed that Dr. Stewart, not finding the speculation pay, had sold his cattle, and his manager, one Oliver, a Californian “Forty-niner,” and his Paraguayan wife, had removed to a place some twenty leagues away, upon the road towards Asuncion.

There we determined to go and rest our horses, and left the place, our guide Florencio’s wife impressing on him to be sure and bring her back a little missal from the capital, and he, just like an Arab or an Indian leaving home, unmoved, merely observing that the folk in Asuncion were “muy ladino” (very cunning), and it behoved a Christian to take care.

A day’s long march brought us near Santa Rosa, and our guide here fell into his first and only error on the road. Pursuing an interminable palm-wood, we came out upon a little plain, all broken here and there with stunted Yatais, then to our great disgust the road bifurcated, and our guide insisted on striking to the left, though I was almost certain it was wrong. After an hour of heavy ploughing through the sand, I suddenly saw two immense palm-trees about a league away upon the right, and luckily remembered that they stood one on each side of the old Jesuit church at Santa Rosa, and after an hour of scrambling through a stony wood arrived at the crossing of the little river just outside the place. Girls carrying water-jars upon their heads, and dressed in long white shifts, embroidered round the neck with coarse black lace, were going and coming in a long procession to the stream. A few old men and about thirty boys composed almost the entire male population of the town. Women entirely ruled the roost, and managed everything, and, as far as I can now recall, did it not much more inefficiently than men. The curious wooden church, dark, and with overhanging eaves, and all the images of saints still left from Jesuit times in choir and nave, with columns hewn from the trunks of massive trees, stood in the centre of the village, which was built after the fashion of a miner’s “row,” or of a St. Simonian phalanstery, each dwelling at least a hundred feet in length, and all partitioned off in the inside for ten or fifteen families. The plaza was overgrown with grass, and on it donkeys played, chasing each other up and down, and sometimes running up the wooden steps of the great church, and stumbling down again. Those who had horses led them down to bathe, cut “pindo” [69] for them, rode them at evening time, and passed their time in dressing and in combing them to get them into condition for the Sunday’s running at the ring, which sport introduced by the Jesuits has continued popular in all the villages of the Misiones up to the present time. The women flirted with the men, who by their rarity were at a premium, gave themselves airs, and went about surrounded by a perpetual and admiring band. The single little shop, which contained needles, gunpowder, and gin, was kept by an Italian, who, as he told me, liked the place, lent money, was a professing and quite unabashed polygamist, and I have no doubt long ere this time has made a fortune, and retired to live at Genoa in the self-same green velvet suit in which he left his home.

In this Arcadia we remained some days, and hired several girls to bathe the horses, which they performed most conscientiously, splashing and shouting in the stream for hours at a time, and bringing back the horses clean, and garnished with flowers in their manes. I rode one day to see a village two or three leagues away, where report said some of the Jesuit books had been preserved; got lost, and passed the night in a small clearing, where a fat and well-cared-for-looking handsome roan horse was tied. On seeing me he broke his picket-rope, ran furiously four or five times round me in circles, and then advancing put his nostrils close to the nostrils of my horse, and seemed to talk to him. His owner, an old Paraguayan, lame from a wound received in jumping from a canoe onto the deck of a Brazilian ironclad, told me his horse had been with him far into the interior, and for a year had never seen another horse. But, he said, “Tata Dios has given every animal its speech after its kind, and he is glad to see your horse, and is no doubt asking him the news.”

During the night, I cannot say exactly what the two horses talked about, but the old Paraguayan talked for hours of his adventures in the lately terminated war. It appeared that he, with seven companions, thinking to take a Brazilian ironclad anchored in the Paraguay, concealed themselves in a small canoe, behind some drift-wood, and floating plants called “camalotes,” drifted down with the stream, and coming to the ship jumped with a yell aboard. The Brazilians, taken by surprise, all ran below, and the poor Paraguayans thinking the ship was theirs, sat quietly down upon the deck to plan what they should do. Seeing them off their guard, some of the crew turned a gun upon them, and at the first fire killed six, and wounded my host, who sprang into the stream, and gained the bank, but most unluckily not on the Paraguayan side. As at that time the Chaco Indians, who had profited by the war to make invasions upon every side, killed every Christian, as my host said “sin perdon,” so he remained half starving for a night and day. On the third morning, wounded as he was, and seeing he must starve or else be killed if seen by Indians, he got a fallen tree, and with great difficulty, and marvellously escaping the fierce fish who come like wolves to the scent of blood, and unmolested by the alligators, he reached the other side. There he was found by some women, lying unconscious on the river-bank, was cured, and though scarred in a dozen places, and lame for life, escaped, as he informed me, by his devotion to San JosÉ, whom he described under the title of the “husband of the mother of our Lord.”

In the morning he rode a league with me upon the way, and as we parted his horse neighed shrilly, reared once or twice, and plunged, and when we separated I looked back and saw the devotee of St. Joseph sitting as firmly as a centaur, as his horse loped along the sandy palm-tree-bordered trail. During our stay at Santa Rosa, which was an offshoot from the more important mission of Santa Maria de FÉ, although they had no priest the people gathered in the church, the Angelus was rung at evening for the “oracion,” and every one on hearing it took off his hat and murmured something that he thought apposite. Thus did ceremony, always much more important than mere faith, continue, and no doubt blessed the poor people to the full as much as if it had been duly sanctified by a tonsured priest, and consecrated by a rightly constituted offertory. We left the place with real regret, and to this day, when in our hurried life I dream of peace, my thoughts go back to the old Paraguayan Jesuit “capilla” lost in the woods of Morosimo, Curupay, and Yba-hai, and with its two tall feathery palm-trees rustling above the desecrated church; to the long strings of white-robed women carrying water-jars, and to the old-world life, perhaps by this time altered and swept away, or yet again not altered, and passing still in the same quiet fashion as when we were there.

Little by little we left the relatively open country of the Misiones behind, and passing Ibyra-pucÚ, San Roque, and Ximenes, came to the river Tebicuary. We passed it in canoes, the horses swimming, with their backs awash and heads emerging like water-monsters, whilst an impassive Indian paddled in the stern, and a young girl stood in the bows wielding a paddle like a water-sprite. The river passed, we got at once into the forests, and followed winding and narrow paths, worn by the footsteps of the mules of ages so deeply that our heavy Gaucho spurs almost trailed on the ground, whilst overhead lianas now and then quite formed a roof, and in the heavy air winged animals of every kind made life a burden. At last, leaving the little town of QuiquyÓ upon the right, we emerged on to a high and barren plain near CaapucÚ. On the evening of the second day from where we crossed the river, we came to Caballero Punta, just underneath a range of flattish hills, and riding to the door at a sharp gallop, pulled up short, and found ourselves greeted by the ex-manager of the Potrero San Antonio, my friend the “Forty-niner,” and for the first time for four months saw a familiar face. Gentle and kindly, though quick on the trigger, as befitted one who had crossed the plains in ’48 on foot, and with his whole possessions packed on a bullock, passing the Rocky Mountains alone, and through the hostile tribes at that time powerful and savage, John Oliver was one of those strange men who, having passed their lives in perils and privations, somehow draw from them that very kindliness which those living in what appear more favourable surroundings so often lack. Born somewhere in the Yorkshire Dales (these he remembered well), and as he thought “back somewhere in the twenties,” he had suffered all his life from the strange fever which impels some men to search for gold. Not on the Stock Exchange, or any of those places where it might reasonably be expected to be found, but in Australia, California, Mexico, in short wherever life was hard, death easy, and experience to be gathered, he sought with pick and shovel, rocker and pan and cradle, the “yellow iron,” as the Apaches used to call it, which sought and found after the fashion of his kind, enriches some one else. From California he had drifted to Peru, from thence to Chile, but finding silver-mining too laborious or too lucrative for his conversing, and hearing of a fertile diggings opened in the Republic of Uruguay, had migrated there, and arrived somehow in Paraguay to find that the enchantment of his life was done, and settled down to live. Tall, and with long grey hair hanging in Western fashion down his back, a careful horseman after the style of the trappers of the West, his pale blue eyes looked out upon the world as with an air of doubt; yet he had served in San Francisco as a “vigilante,” sojourned with Brigham Young in Salt Lake City, leaving as he confessed two or three wives among the saints, sat in Judge Lynch’s court a dozen times, most probably had killed a man or two; still, to my fancy, if the meek are to inherit any portion of the earth, his share should not be small.

He made us welcome, and his wife waited upon us, never presuming to sit down and eat, but standing ready with a napkin fringed with lace, to wipe our hands, pressing the food upon us, and behaving generally as if she found herself in the presence of some strange beings of an unfamiliar race. He said he had no children and was glad of it, for he explained that “Juaneeter was a good woman, but ‘uneddicated,’ and he had never taken thoroughly to half-caste pups, though he remembered some born of a Pi-Ute woman, way back somewhere about the fifties, who he supposed by now were warriors, and had taken many scalps.” His wife stood by, not understanding any English and but little Spanish, which he himself spoke badly, and their talk was held in a strange jargon mixed with Guarani, without a verb, without a particle, and yet sufficient for the two simple creatures whom a strange fate, or a discerning, ever-watchful Providence, had thus ordained to meet. No books were in the place, except a Bible, which he read little of late years, partly from failing sight, and partly, as he said, because he had detected what seemed to him “exaggerations,” chiefly in figures and as to the number of the unbelievers whom the Chosen People slew. Two days or more, for time was taken no account of in his house, we waited with him, talking late every night of Salt Lake, Brigham Young, the Mountain-meadows Massacre, Kit Carson, Cochise and Mangas Coloradas, and matters of that kind which interested him, and which, when all is said, are just as interesting to those attuned to them, as is polemical theology, theories of art, systems of jurisprudence, the origin of the Atoll Islands, or any of the wise futilities with which men stock their minds. We parted on the third or fourth, or perhaps the fifth or sixth day, knowing that we should never meet again, and taking off my silver spurs I gave them to him, and he presented me with a light summer poncho woven by his wife. Much did he thank me for my visit, and made me swear never to pass the district without stopping at his house. This I agreed to do, and if I pass again either by Caballero Punta or by CaapucÚ, I will keep faith; but he, I fear, will have deceived me, and in the churchyard of the “capilla,” under a palm-tree, with a rough cross above him, I shall find my simple friend.

Three or four days of jogging steadily, passing by Quindy, and through the short “estero” of Acaai, which we passed splashing for several hours up to the girths, brought us to Paraguari, which, with its saddle-shaped mountain overhanging it, stood out a mark for leagues upon the level plain. Seldom in any country have I seen a railway so fall into the landscape as did the line at the little terminus of this the only railway in all Paraguay. The war had left the country almost in ruins, business was at a standstill, food was scarce, and but for a bale or two of tobacco, and a hide-sack or two of yerba, the train went empty to and fro. But as the people always wanted to go to the capital in search of work, six or eight empty trucks were always sent with every train. On them the people (mostly women) swarmed, seated like flies, upon the top and sides, dangling their legs outside like people sitting on a wharf, talking incessantly, all dressed in white, and every one, down to the smallest children, smoking large cigars. Six hours the passage took, if all went well, the distance being under fifty miles. If aught went wrong, it took a day or more, and at the bridges the trucks were all unhooked and taken over separately, so rotten was the state of the whole line, and in addition every here and there bridges had been blown away during the war, and roughly rendered serviceable by shoring up with wood. To meet a train labouring and puffing through the woods, the people clustering like bees upon the trucks, the engineer seated in shirt-sleeves, whilst some women stoked the fire, was much the same as it is to meet a caravan meandering across the sands. If you desired to talk with any one the train incontinently stopped, the passengers got out, relit their cigarettes, the women begged, the time of day was passed, and curiosity thus satisfied you passed on upon the road, and the “Maquina-guazu,” [78] as it was called, pursued contentedly the jolting and uneven tenor of its way. We naturally despised it, though the conductor, scenting business, offered to take us and our horses at almost any price we chose.

By the Laguna Ypocarai we took our way; skirting along its eastern shores, then desolate, and the whole district almost depopulated, we passed by palm-groves and deserted mandioca patches, reed cottages in ruins, watched the flamingoes fishing in the lake, the alligators lying motionless, and saw an Indian all alone in a dug-out canoe, casting his line as placidly as he had lived before the coming of the Spaniards to the land. A red-blue haze hung on the waters of the lake, reflected from the bright red earth, peeping between the trees, and on the islands drifts of mist gave an effect as if the palms were parachutes dropped from balloons, or perhaps despatched from earth to find out whether in the skies there could be anything more lovely than this quiet inland sea. Close to the top end of the lake stands Aregua, once under the Mercenary friars of Asuncion, who, as Azara says, having made the people of the place work for them for near two hundred years, began to think they were indeed their slaves, till an official sent from Spain in 1783 gave them their liberty, and the Mercenaries (as he says) at once retreated in disgust. Here we fell in with a compatriot, who at our time of meeting him was drunk. He told us that he passed his time after the fashion of the patriarchs in the Old Testament, and on arriving at his house it seemed he was provided with several wives, but of the flocks and herds, and other trade-marks of his supposed estate, we saw no trace. Still he was hospitable, setting the women to cut down pindo for the horses, take them to water, bathe them, and finally to cook some dinner for ourselves. His chief complaint was that his wives were Catholics, and now and then trudged off to mass, and left him without any one to cook his food. I doubted personally if a change of creed would better things, but held my peace, seeing the man set store by the faith which he had learnt in youth and still said he practised, but, as far as I could see, only by cursing the religion of the people of the place. We left his house without regret, though he was hospitable and half drunk for nearly all the time that we were there, and started on our last day’s march considerably refreshed by meeting one who in a foreign land, far from home ties and moral influences, yet still pursued the simple practice of the faith which he had learned at home.Luque, upon its little hill, the Campo Grande, like a dry lake, surrounded by thick woods on every side, and then the Recoleta, we passed, and entering the red sandy road made at the conquest to move troops upon, we saw the churches of Asuncion only a league away. And yet we lingered, walking our horses slowly in the deep red sand, passing the strings of countrywomen with baskets on their heads, driving their donkeys packed with sugar-cane, and smoking as they went; we lingered, feeling that the trip was done; not that we minded that our fortunes were not made, but vaguely felt that for the last five months we had lived a time which in our lives we should not see again, and fearing rather than looking forward to all the approaching change. The horses too were fat, in good condition, had become old friends, knew us so well we never tied them, but all night in camp left them to feed, being certain that they would not stray; and thus to leave them at the end of a long trip seemed as unreasonable as to part from an old friend simply because death calls.

The road grew wider, passed through some scattered houses, buried in orange and guayaba trees, ran through some open patches where grew wild indigo and castor-oil plants, with a low palm-scrub, entered a rancheria just outside the town, and then turned to a sandy street which merged in a great market, where, as it seemed, innumerable myriads were assembled, all chattering at once, or so it struck us coming from the open solitary plains and the dark silent woods. The lowness of the river having stopped the Brazilian mail-boat from coming down from Corumba, we put up at the “Casa Horrocks,” the resort of all the waifs and strays storm-bound in Paraguay. The town buried in vegetation, the sandy streets, all of them watercourses after a night’s rain, the listless life, the donkeys straying to and fro, the white-robed women, with their hair hanging down their backs, and cut square on the forehead after the style so usual amongst Iceland ponies, the great unfinished palaces, the squares with grass five or six inches high, and over all the reddish haze blending the palm-trees, houses, sandy streets, the river and the distant Chaco into a copper-coloured whole at sunset, rise to my memory like the reflection of a dream. A dream seen in a convex mirror, opening away from me as years have passed, the actual things, men, actions, and occurrences of daily life seem swollen in it at the far end of some perspective, but the impression of the whole fresh and clear-cut in memory, standing out as boldly as the last day when on the “Pateador” I had a farewell gallop on the beach. Adios, “Pateador,” or “till so long”—horses will be born as good, better, ten thousand times more valuable, and dogs will eat them, but for myself, and for the owner of the “Bayo Overo,” not all the coursers of the sun could stir the reminiscences of youth, of lonely camping-grounds, long nights in drenching rain, struggles with wind, wild gallops in the dark; the hopes and fears of the five months when we went fortune-seeking, and by God’s mercy failed in our search, as the mere mention of those names forgotten to all the world except ourselves.

Eight or ten days had passed away, and we grew quite familiar with the chief features of the place, having made acquaintance with the Brazilian officers of the army and the fleet, the German apothecary, with Dr. Stewart, the chief European of the place, when news came that the Brazilian mail-boat had at last arrived. We bade our friends good-bye, entrusted both our horses to the care of Horrocks, fed them ourselves for the last time, and went on board the ship; a coppery haze hung over everything, the heat raising a faint quivering in the air, the thick yellowish water of the stream lapping against the vessel’s sides like oil, the boat shoved off, our friends perspiring in the sun raising a washed-out cheer. The vessel swung into the stream, her paddles turned, the great green flag with the orange crown imperial flapped at the jackstaff, and the town dropped rapidly astern.

A quarter of a league and the church towers, tall palm-trees, the unfinished palaces, and the great theatre began to fade into the haze. Then sheering a little to the Left bank, the vessel passed a narrow tongue of land covered with grass, whereon two horses fed. As we drew nearer I saw they were our own, and jumping on the taffrail shouted “Adios,” at which they raised their heads, or perhaps raised them but at the snorting steamer, and as they looked we passed racing down stream, and by degrees they became dimmer, smaller, less distinct, and at the last melted and vanished into the reddish haze.