A GROUP of children playing on the “main street,” so-called, burst into shouts of astonishment as they caught sight of the coach which three times a week made the trip from the dam to Fuerte Sarmiento, for it presented an extraordinary appearance.

These little ragamuffins, busy with their games in the ruts and holes of the highway, presented all the racial diversities characteristic of the settlement’s population. There were white children shuffling about in their elders’ cast-off shoes, their small forms lost in the baggy folds of their fathers’ trousers; and there were half-breed children whose dress had been simplified to a mere shirt, short enough to expose their little copper-colored bellies to the air.

As the travellers who arrived at the dam had rarely been known to bring anything with them in the way of baggage save a canvas sack in which was heaped whatever clothing they possessed, the young inhabitants were very naturally excited and astonished at sight of the trunks and boxes heaped on the top of the mail coach, as, drawn by four lean and clay-spattered nags, it rattled up the road. So high was the pile of luggage roped on to the coach roof that, as the stage lurched into and out of the ruts of the clay road, the whole structure tipped over at such an angle that it seemed about to upset.

The men who were out of work, attracted by the novel sight, stood watching from the doorway of the tavern. The coach stopped finally in front of the frame house occupied by Watson, who came out in front of his door, his servants peering from the doorway behind him.

As soon as they saw that the passenger stepping down from the coach was Robledo, men and women rushed forward to greet him, stretching out their hands to him in the confident comradeship of the desert. But everyone promptly forgot him at sight of the other passengers.

First came the Marquis de Torre Bianca, who turned around to help his wife to alight from the clumsy steps.

The Marquise, dressed in a luxurious travelling suit which contrasted oddly with her surroundings, wore the hard expression which disfigured her beauty in her bad moments. In spite of her thick veil, the red dust of the long road she had travelled covered her face and hair. With scarcely restrained astonishment and ill-humor, she looked about her, and her eyes betrayed the despair with which she was saying to herself, “Is this what I have come to?”

“Well, here we are,” said Robledo cheerfully. “Two days and two nights from Buenos Aires, and a couple of hours driving through a dust storm, that isn’t so bad! The ends of the earth are quite a way off from here!”

Several of the workmen who had welcomed Robledo began, of their own accord, to unload the baggage. These were Elena’s things sent on to her at Barcelona by her maid, and she cherished them. They were the chests and boxes saved from her shipwreck!

Meanwhile a group of children and ragged women had gathered around Elena, gazing at her with amazement and admiration, as though she had fallen into their midst from another planet. Some of the little girls timidly felt of the cloth of her dress. Their fingers had never touched anything so wonderful!

By this time the news of Robledo’s arrival had reached Canterac, Pirovani, and Moreno, and the engineer was presenting them to his friends.

Watson, seeing that the multitude of bags and boxes was being carried into the house he occupied with Robledo, said to his partner,

“You don’t expect the lady to share our rough quarters, do you?”

“The lady,” Robledo replied, “is the wife of an old college friend of mine. He is going to take pot luck with us, and so is she. You don’t need to build a palace for her.”

But Elena found it difficult to conceal her distress as she looked about at the rooms that she was henceforth to live in; rough wooden walls, scanty and awkward furniture, and scattered about, on every side, saddles, engineering instruments, and sacks of provisions; and everything in this house, occupied by two busy men who had no thought for anything except their work, was in disorder, and covered with dust.

Torre Bianca was never under any circumstances surprised. As Robledo took him through the house, putting in a word of apology now and then for its appearance, the Marquis smiled gently at his friend. Whatever Manuel did seemed to him worthy of approbation.

“And here are the servants,” said Robledo, introducing to Elena a fat half-breed, already well on in years, who acted as housekeeper, two little barefooted mestizas, who served as errand girls, and the Spanish peasant who took care of the horses. All of this ragged crew expressed with incessant smiles the admiration they felt for the beautiful lady, and Elena finally broke into a laugh as she remembered the servants she had left in Paris.

After supper Robledo took his partner aside to discuss the progress of the work with him.

As Watson showed him the plans and documents, he also mentioned what Canterac had said to him that afternoon.

“He says that in six months we shall be irrigating....”

Robledo looked immensely pleased.

“Then we’ll see this hard baked soil that bears nothing but matorrales now, turn into the kind of earth they must have had in the Garden of Eden. Thousands of people will lead happier and better lives here than they could ever do in the old world, and with all that, you and I, Watson, are going to get rich. We’ll get rich because we’ll be helping other people to get rich. That’s the way it goes. If you want progress, you’ve got to make it profitable to somebody.”

The two friends sat silent, looking into the air before them as if they saw there the lands eternally green, and gurgling canals in which gleamed silver water, the roads bordered with tall trees, and the white houses, which were to come to life on the arid mesa at the magic touch of water. Watson, as he saw the picture unfold before him, was reminded of his native California; to Robledo, the scene in his mind’s eye, was very like his beloved Valencia.

It was Watson who came out of his day-dream first. He nodded towards the adjoining room in which they had left the new arrivals. The Marquis was dozing in a canvas chair; Elena sat at a little distance from him, her head in her hands, in a tragic attitude which indicated plainly that the question, “What have I come to?” was throbbing in her mind with desperate persistence.

During the few days she had spent in Buenos Aires her exile had seemed to her tolerable. The capital was like any large European city. It was only after determined search that she had discovered a corner of the old colonial town, a small remnant of earlier and more primitive times, barely sufficient to convince her that she had actually reached America.

The only thing that had seemed really strange to her during her sojourn in Buenos Aires, besides her quarters in a second-class hotel, was the absence of her automobile; aside from this, her manner of living had undergone no great change. But then came that terrible journey across interminable plains through which the train crawled hour-long, and never a house nor a living soul. It was as though the world had suddenly become nothing but space! And then the arrival in this strange land where the turn of a wheel or even a step started up clouds of dust; where the soil which was dissolved and held in suspension in the air clogged and irritated her nose and throat; where the people looked ragged and unkempt, and yet treated everyone else with a certain familiarity, as though they considered anyone who came there, their equal! “What had she come to?”

Robledo answered the question he read in his partner’s eyes.

“My friend is going to help us. He’s an engineer. But don’t worry about him. I am going to give him a share in our business, out of my half of course.”

Then he told Watson the few facts he thought his partner should know about the Marquis.

“As long as your friend is going to help us,” said the young American, “you had better take his share out of my half as well as yours. He seems a nice fellow. Anyway I feel sorry for his wife.”

Robledo took the boy’s hand in his, in quick response to his generosity, and they dropped the subject.

On the very next morning, Elena, who showed a certain easy adaptability to the diverse circumstances of her life, set out to win the admiration of her hosts by her domestic talents, just as, a few weeks earlier, she had sought distinction in Paris drawing rooms through quite other attainments. Dressed in a tailored suit which she had cast aside in Paris, but which caused a great sensation among the engineer’s servants, she started out, with carefully gloved hands, to set the house in order.

The half-breed and her two little helpers submissively followed the seÑora around, until the moment came when Elena rashly ventured to add example to precept; whereupon her ignorance of housework became immediately apparent. It was only too clear that she did not at all know how to do the things she had ordered to be done, and the half-breed’s help was more than once required in order to get the Marquise out of the difficulties her ignorance had plunged her into.

In the kitchen a stove, in which was burned the same oil as that used for the dredging machines, served for cooking purposes. Elena, delighted by the ease with which the flame could be lighted and put out, determined to have something to do with the preparations of the next meal. But she soon had to retire before the superior skill of the half-breed, who was now frankly laughing at her pretensions as a housekeeper.

Still trying to be useful, Elena took off her gloves in order to wash the dishes, but she at once put them on again, fearful that the very hot water might injure her delicate skin, and destroy the polish of her nails—and she remembered that in her moments of despair, she had felt a certain relief in contemplating her hands.

Torre Bianca, dressed in a tweed riding suit, accompanied Watson and Robledo to the canals. He watched the pile drivers at work, saw what was being done, and talked with the peons. It wasn’t long before he was covered with dust from head to foot; his sunburned hands itched painfully; and yet he already felt the happy tranquillity of the man who knows that he can earn his daily bread.

At nightfall the three engineers returned to the house, where they found dinner awaiting them. Elena had been complaining of the rustic simplicity of the table covers and plates. The half-breed, at her instigation, purchased for a modest price, some additional pieces of china which had found their way from Buenos Aires to the “Galician’s Resort.” The next day some flowers, brought in by the two little copper-colored errand girls, appeared on the table, and it became more evident from day to day that there was now a woman accustomed to the refinements of life in the engineers’ house.

One evening, while the half-breed was serving the first course, Elena threw off from about her shoulders an old evening wrap which, as it was somewhat the worse for its previous services, she now used as a dressing gown. As she emerged from this covering it was revealed that she was in evening dress. Her gown was a little worn, but it was still a brilliant relic of happier days.

Watson looked at her with astonishment, Robledo made a gesture which indicated that he thought she had gone crazy, but the Marquis remained impassive, as though nothing that Elena did could cause him any surprise.

“I’ve always dressed for dinner,” observed Elena, “and I don’t see any reason for changing my habits here. It would make me so uncomfortable!”

The hours after the evening meal were usually spent in long conversations. Robledo did most of the talking. He liked to tell the stories of the various interesting characters he had seen pass through “the land of all the world.” Many of them had already wandered over a great part of the planet before they landed in the port of Buenos Aires. Others eager for adventure had fled to the new continent in order to begin a new life there.

In the capital they had encountered the same obstacles as those they had run away from in Europe. The big city was already old. Tenements and slums had grown up there too, and it was as hard to make a living as ever it was in Europe. Sometimes it was even harder, so great was the competition between all professions in the crowd thronging into Buenos Aires from every quarter of the globe.

So they sought the waste places of the republic, the territories that were still arid plains, and began transforming them for the future generations of immigrants.

“What a lot of strange characters I have seen pass through here!” Robledo would begin. “I remember one fellow, a peon, who, in spite of his angry-looking, bulbous nose, inflamed by long years of drinking, still had something about him that suggested an interesting history. When he came straggling through here he was nothing but a wreck; but he was like those ruined palaces, the smallest fragment of which, a piece of broken pillar, or a bit of pediment, picked up from among the crumbled walls, evokes the splendors of the past. Yet this fellow would stop at nothing, not even theft, when he craved drink, and would lie for days on the ground dead drunk. But a gesture, a chance word would make us suspect that he had not always been a dirty, drink-sodden vagabond.

“One day I found him brushing the foreman’s hair, just for the joke of the thing, and shaping the fellow’s mustache, making it look like Kaiser Wilhelm’s. So I gave him a drink, I gave him all the drinks he could hold, because that’s the only way to make that kind of a fellow talk. And so I learned that this broken-down old drunkard was a German baron, once a captain of the Imperial Guard. He had gambled with some money left in his charge by his superior officers, and instead of committing suicide, as his family expected him to do, he came to America, where he began his career as a general. He ended up a useless, drunken, day-laborer.”

Seeing that Elena was interested, Robledo went on modestly,

“This German baron was a general in one of the revolutions in Venezuela. I, too, was once a general in another South American republic. I was even minister of war for ten days ... but they threw me out for being too scientific, and for not knowing how to handle a machete as well as my aides.”

Then Robledo went on to speak of another peon, a drunkard also, a silent gloomy sort of fellow, who had crawled into the camp up at the dam to die. They had buried him near the river, and Robledo had found some of the poor devil’s papers in the canvas sack the vagabond dragged along with him. He had once been a well-known architect in Vienna. One of the photographs among the papers was of a lady with an impressive head-dress and long pendent earrings, who looked very much like the murdered Empress. This was the architect’s wife. While her husband was accompanying General Gordon on one of his expeditions she had been killed in Khartoum, torn to pieces by the fanatics that the Mahdi was leading through the Sudan. The other photograph, that of a handsome Austrian officer, his white coat snugly fitted in at the waist, was the vagabond’s son.

“And it’s no use trying to reform those fellows,” said Robledo. “You may clean them up a bit, and make life a little more comfortable for them, you may preach to them about drinking less, and try in every way to help them ‘get back’—As soon as they are rested and begin to look a little happier, they come up to you some fine morning with packs on their backs. ‘Well, I’m off, boss! What’s due me?’ And it’s no use asking them any questions. Everything is all right, they have no complaints to make; but just the same they light out. No sooner do they get a few square meals than the devil who drives them round and round the globe suddenly remembers them and starts them off again. They know perfectly well that beyond the horizon line out yonder are the Andes, and beyond the Andes, Chile; and beyond that the Pacific and its islands, and then the crowding masses of China.... And so their mania for wandering awakens ... they must always see what is beyond.... They pick up their bundles and start out again, with hunger and exhaustion waiting for them out there.... They die in hospitals, or in the desert; and if they do not die but keep on, always following the ‘beyond’ that mocks and beguiles them, they turn up here again—but only because they have made a complete circuit of the globe.”

Now and then the two engineers spoke of their own lives. Watson’s history was of the briefest. Leaving his native California after graduating from Berkeley, he had taken up his engineering work in the silver mines of Mexico, and from there he had gone to Peru. Finally he had moved on to Buenos Aires where he had met Robledo, and it was there the two men had gone into partnership in order to carry out their Rio Negro enterprise.

The Spaniard did not like to recall his experiences in America before his arrival in Argentina. In that earlier period he had taken part in revolutions for which he felt nothing but contempt, becoming involved in them merely because of his desire for activity. For the same reason he had undertaken various business ventures only to discover in the course of them that he was being deceived and robbed, sometimes by his partners, sometimes by the government. Violent changes in his fortunes had thrown him from absurd abundance into abject want. But he avoided talking of all this, and most of his stories were about life in Patagonia.

Once he had crossed the enormous plateau which begins at the cut of the Black River and stretches toward the Strait of Magellan. He had started out on this exploring expedition after resigning his position with the Argentine government, and to avoid expense he had taken with him only a native peon and a troup of six desert horses capable of feeding on the rough weeds of the mesa. Robledo and the peon rode all day, changing horses at frequent intervals. The engineer had, with the help of some of his friends, made out a map indicating the springs, the only possible camping places.

For several years there had been droughts. On reaching the first spring Robledo found that it was very salty. He was accustomed to the brackish water which the optimism of the desert explorers considers drinkable; but the water in this spring was of saltiness that was more than he or the Indian with him could stomach.

They went on, confident that they would come upon a spring the next day. When they reached it they found that it did not contain salt water, for the reason that there was no water in it at all. So they continued across the plateau that was always endless and always the same. Steering their course by the compass, they suffered a thirst which made them walk with their lower jaws drooping, and through their eyes, starting from their heads, passed now and then the terrifying glitter of madness. And finally they had been forced to resort to a loathesome thing in order to ease the torment of their swollen tongues and throats with a little liquid.

“What tormented me,” said Robledo, “was the memory of all the times when I had been asked to have a drink in some cafÉ or other, and had not cared enough about what was set before me to drink it—beer, charged waters, iced drinks—and then I was stricken with remorse at the memory of certain parties I had been to, when I had passed by the buffet full of decanters and bottles without taking any of their contents, for I kept saying to myself, excited with fever as I was, and staggering along under the hard merciless sun, ‘If you had drunk all the beers, and all the soda waters, and all the iced drinks that were offered you and that you didn’t appreciate, you would now have inside of you a reserve store of liquids and you’d be able to stand this awful thirst much better!’ And this absurd idea tormented me like remorse for a crime, and at times I wanted to punch my own head for my stupidity in not having drunk everything that had once been within my reach so that I might have been prepared for that awful desert trip.

“Finally, with only two of our six horses still stumbling along beside us, we reached a well of fresh water. That was the most delicious drink of my whole life! And after all our long hard pull through that desert of death, we found nothing! The information I had been given, and to confirm which I had started off on this expedition, proved to be false.... But that’s the way you have to seek fortune now, for those of us who go to the new world are half a century late. All the rich lands, those easy to develop, have been taken up, and only those that are remote and inhospitable, are left—and often all that they offer is ruin and death.

“However,” Robledo continued, “men go right on coming to this corner of the globe. Hope lives here among us, and without hope life is intolerable. And just consider our own household for instance! Elena there, a Russian, Federico, Italian, Watson from the United States, I a Spaniard. And the people who come to see us are each of them of a different nationality. As I say, it’s the land of all!”

Little by little it became the custom of the most important personages of the settlement to call at the engineers’ house after supper. First to appear was Canterac, in a suit of military cut, and still more carefully brushed and polished than before the arrival of the Torre Biancas. Then came Moreno, betraying a certain nervous agitation at greeting his hostess, uttering a few stammerings instead of words, and almost biting off his tongue in the tenseness of his embarrassment. And last came Pirovani, displaying a new suit every other night, and always bringing his hostess a present.

Canterac used to laugh at him, asserting that if Pirovani was late it was because he had been polishing his watch charms, watch chain and cuff buttons, so as to dazzle the rest of the company.

One evening the Italian appeared in a startling suit just arrived from Bahia Blanca, bearing in his fat hand a bouquet of enormous roses.

“These were brought down to me today from Buenos Aires, seÑora marquesa, and I hasten to lay them at your feet!”

Canterac glared at the Italian with mock indignation, and murmured in a loud aside to Robledo,

“That’s a lie! These roses came by telegraph! Moreno, who knows everything, told me so, and this afternoon Pirovani sent a man to get them from the station. He had strict orders to gallop all the way!”

The housekeeper and the two little half-breeds cleared the table, and the living room, in spite of its rough wooden partitions, began to look suggestive of festivity, as the three callers grouped about Elena, offering her compliments and conversation, according to their talents. It was noticeable that they invariably repeated the word marquesa at every opportunity, as though they enjoyed being constantly reminded that they were in such distinguished company.

Elena soon discovered a preference for Canterac which she made no attempt to conceal. After all, he was of her world, although his circle in Paris had not been the same as hers. Yet it had been adjacent, and though they had never met, they discovered that they had mutual friends.

While the Frenchman and Elena talked, Moreno smoked resignedly, exchanging a few words with Watson, or listening to Pirovani’s discussions with Robledo and the Marquis. But he had little attention for anyone save the Marquise and Canterac, whom he watched with anxious eyes. However, the tertulia underwent a transformation after the arrival of Pirovani with his roses.

The next evening Elena and the men of her household were sitting at table, more silent than usual. She was wearing one of her most startling evening dresses, one which, even in Paris, would have been described as daring. But the three engineers, still in their work clothes, appeared to be exhausted by the day’s labors. Robledo yawned several times though he was making valiant efforts to keep awake. The Marquis was quietly nodding in his chair; and Elena meanwhile was looking at Watson as though she had for the first time become aware of him, which caused the young American considerable discomfort.

Suddenly Pirovani appeared at the door, carrying a large package, and arrayed in a new suit of wide checked material whose many colors resembled the mottled patterns of a python’s skin.

“SeÑora marquesa,” he began solemnly, “a friend of mine in Buenos Aires has just sent me this box of caramels. Allow me to present them to you!”

Elena, amused by the contractor’s new clothes, smilingly acknowledged his present, rewarding him for his attentions with several glances full of coquetry.

At that point, Moreno arrived, recklessly gotten up in patent leather boots, a wide-skirted cutaway, and a high silk hat, just as though he were about to call on his chief, the Minister of the Interior.

Robledo, rousing a little at these arrivals, observed ironically,

“What elegance, Moreno!”

“I was afraid,” exclaimed the latter “that these things would get moth eaten in the trunk, so I put them on to give them an airing.”

Timidly he approached Elena. “Good evening, seÑora marquesa!” Imitating the personages of elegant life and manners whom he had so often admired in novels and on the stage, he bent over her hand. Then unwilling to leave her side after this successful performance, he did his utmost to keep up a conversation with her, to Pirovani’s intense indignation. Finally the Italian got up, as a protest against this intrusion, and could be heard inquiring of Robledo in his corner,

“Did you ever see anything like the get-up of that jackass?”

But the surprises of the evening were not yet over.

The door opened once more, and Canterac appeared on the threshold, where he paused a moment, giving all his spectators the opportunity to get a good look at him.

He wore a dinner coat, and a fine and exquisitely ironed dress shirt, and when finally he stepped into the room, he did so with a certain languid grace as though he were presenting himself in a Paris drawing room. After a slight bow to the men, he bent over Elena and kissed her hand.

“I too felt like dressing for dinner this evening, Marquesa, as in the good old times.”

Elena, pleased by this homage, turned her back upon Moreno, and made the new arrival sit down beside her. For the rest of the evening she devoted most of her attentions to the Frenchman, while Pirovani sulked in a corner, making small attempt to conceal his displeasure, though he was obviously impressed by Canterac’s aristocratic appearance.

For several evenings after this the contractor failed to appear. Moreno, curious about the reason for his absence, called at the Italian’s and came back with some news.

“Pirovani’s gone to Bahia Blanca without telling anyone what for. He must have some important business on.”

So the tertulias continued. Canterac in his dinner coat still enjoyed Elena’s preference, and Moreno got into his swallow-tail every evening for no other purpose apparently than to carry on his desultory conversations with Torre Bianca. Even the Marquis appeared one evening in a dinner coat, and when Robledo made a gesture of astonishment, he gave a shrug and a nod towards his wife.

On the fifth evening Moreno came rushing in to announce that Pirovani had returned. “He may be here at any moment now!”

And since Pirovani had provided them all with a subject for speculation, everyone had the sense of waiting for him to put in an appearance.

Then the door opened; and pausing on the threshold as Canterac had done, in order to allow the onlookers to get the full effect of his attire, Pirovani appeared, in a frock coat that was resplendent with lapels of a heavily ribbed silk, the fibres of which were as thick as those of wood, a white waistcoat richly embroidered, a white camelia in his buttonhole, and a large ribbon from which dangled a monocle.... Needless to say, he had never learned to wear one!

His aspect was solemn and magnificent, like that of a circus director, or a world-famous prestidigitator. Making manful efforts to preserve his calm and conceal his emotions, he nodded with masculine indifference to the men, and bowed low before the marquesa, whose hand he raised to his lips.

Elena’s eyes gleamed with suppressed amusement. Everything about Pirovani always seemed to her humorous. But, perceiving that this transformation had been accomplished in her honor, she welcomed him affectionately, and made him sit down beside her. Canterac, visibly offended by his rival’s triumph, abruptly left the group, while Moreno, with a scandalized expression, made a gesture towards Pirovani and muttered to Robledo,

“So that’s the important business he took a trip to Bahia Blanca for! That’s what he made such a mystery about!”

Robledo, however, left him to mutter alone, and went on talking to Watson, who, still dazed by the contractor’s theatrical entrance, was watching him with considerable amusement.

“From dinner coats to swallow-tails,” growled Robledo. “We’ll be holding carnival out on the desert soon, and this woman will be driving us all crazy before we get through!”

He glanced with relief at the young American, who, like himself, still wore his simple work clothes, and mentally compared his appearance with that of the other men in the room.

“What a commotion that sort of woman stirs up in a frontier settlement, where men live alone, and have no other distraction from their work!” he thought. “And she’s only just begun.... Who knows what she’ll try next? We may all end up by killing one another on her account! Perhaps this is Helen of Troy in our midst....”

With a cynical shrug, Robledo turned his back on the group around Elena. He had done his best to leave her in the old world—His conscience was clear on that score!