TO young Watson it seemed that events were now following one another with the dizzy rapidity and the absurd lack of logical sequence characteristic of a dream, or of something equally independent of time and space.

First came shots; then there passed before his eyes several riders, some of them advancing at a gallop, while others, halting, fired at the mountaineers. In vain Piola raised both hands in the air, shouting,

“Don’t shoot, brother, we surrender!”

The men just arriving didn’t want to hear and went on firing in spite of Robledo’s shouts.

Piola’s comrade fell wounded; and at this Piola himself thought it advisable to fall to the ground and take refuge behind his horse.

The whole group of horsemen from La Presa were finally assembled on the same plateau in front of the ranch house; but Watson paid not the slightest attention to Robledo’s exclamations of astonishment at finding him there. Nor did he waste any time on the comisario’s salutations. Anyway these two recent arrivals promptly forgot him, and went to see what information they could get out of Piola by placing their revolver muzzles against his chest, while they demanded that he tell them what had been done with Celinda. Some of the other members of the rescue party dismounted to have a look at the man just wounded, as well as at the one hit a few minutes earlier by don Carlos.

What most attracted Watson’s attention in the whole strange scene was the presence of his own horse there, with Cachafaz importantly straddling him and pointing accusingly at the three prisoners.

“It was those bad gauchos who took away my patroncita! I saw them!”

But he was inconsiderately interrupted, for someone grasped him round the waist and rudely robbed him of the dignity of his commanding position by setting him down on the sand.

With a determined effort to pay no attention to the pain it caused him, Richard had made use of his one serviceable arm to get possession of his horse. The animal recognized the feel of his master in the saddle, and needed no spurring to start off at full gallop in the direction taken by Rojas.

The rancher had already been in close pursuit of Manos Duras for several minutes, and he had not given up hopes of overtaking him. It was difficult to keep the horses at a gallop on those sandy slopes, and besides, the animal Manos Duras rode had two burdens to carry; and all the while he was spurring on his horse the bandit had to keep tight hold of the still unsubdued Celinda. Rojas had the advantage of two free hands as he gave chase.

The gaucho turned around several times, taking aim with the revolver he held in his left hand. Two bullets whistled past don Carlos. He replied with two bullets, then stopped. He had just discovered that he had only three more cartridges. That morning when he had started out for La Presa he had strapped on his holster case without filling the empty sockets. Only three shots more! But he had the knife he always carried for the emergencies that might arise as he rode over his property in his belt.... Besides, shooting was dangerous. He might wound Celinda.

The gaucho, better supplied with shot, went on firing with great lavishness as he sped away.

An overwhelming indignation swept through the rancher as he perceived what Manos Duras was attempting to do.

“Shameless cattle thief! He’s aiming at my horse!”

And to the horse-loving creole, this was as despicable a crime, as just a cause for unlimited vengeance, as the injury done him, don Carlos Rojas, by robbing him of his daughter.

But in a few moments the rancher, who rode a horse as though moulded to it, felt a mortal shudder under him. Instantly he lifted his feet from the stirrups and jumped to the ground, but scarcely had his foot touched the sand when the animal fell heavily, a stream of blood pouring out of his breast like the crimson spurtings of a shattered wine cask.

The rancher stood by helplessly while the bandit sped away, holding Celinda down on the saddle-tree.... Then he concentrated all his will on the hand that held his revolver. He must kill the bandit’s horse.

And the man trembled with emotion. Not all his combats with men and wild beasts had prepared him for this. How could he, to whom a horse was like a child of his flesh, shoot one down in cold blood?... But there, growing smaller in the increasing distance, was Celinda, struggling, crying out!

He was, as a rule, a sure shot. But he fired without effect; and again he fired. The gaucho still sped on, and don Carlos raised his revolver for the last shot. Suddenly Manos Duras’s horse staggered, slowed down and plunged to the ground, raising a cloud of dust in a last frenzied kick.

Rojas ran forward; but before he reached the struggling group Manos Duras had already extricated himself from the saddle, and, still holding Celinda, stood waiting for him, his second revolver drawn.

Don Carlos went a few steps further; but the shot that rang out passed so near his cheek that for a moment he thought it must have caught him. He dropped to the ground in order to offer the marksman a smaller target, and dragged himself along, keeping his revolver in his left hand. The gaucho, unaware that his enemy had but one shot left, thought it was don Carlos’ intention to draw nearer so as to make sure of the effect of his bullets, and he went on firing, holding Celinda in front of him the while as a shield against her father’s shots. But the girl’s struggles to free herself from the grip of that sinewy arm shook his hand and spoiled the bandit’s aim.

“If you try one more shot, old man, I kill your daughter!”

This warning, added to the knowledge that he had but one more bullet in his cartridge chamber, forced don Carlos to content himself with slowly crawling forward over the sand, seeking the shelter of the hummocks on its surface.

But meanwhile Manos Duras became instinctively aware of the presence of a new danger. He looked about attempting to discover it; but the one menacing him from in front soon called for all his attention.

The invisible enemy recently arrived was Watson, who, when he heard shots, dismounted, and under cover of the rough desert brush, advanced Indian-fashion towards the scene of the revolver duel.

For a moment he felt tempted to fire from the back at Manos Duras; but there was danger of his wounding Celinda whose movements could not be counted on. So he returned to his horse and detached from the saddle the lassoo that the seÑorita de Rojas had given him. Holding it in his right hand, he circled about through the matorrales until he was directly behind the bandit.

Going even this short distance caused him acute pain. Several times the thorny branches of the harsh desert growths caught at his wounded shoulder, and uncertainty made him tremble with nervousness. Would he have sufficient skill to use this primitive weapon?

He was troubled at recalling how Flor de Rio Negro had laughed at him, in childish enjoyment of his clumsiness; but the memory of the happy rides they had had together, and the sight of her now in close peril of death or worse, brought his energy flooding back; and some of the principles instilled in him as a boy, and the methodical, practical spirit of his race, came to stiffen his courage. “Whatever you do, do it well” ... somehow that seemed to the point. Confiding in the mysterious and intangible powers that control our lives, and that from time to time, show an inexplicable preference for some of us, and protect us from apparently inescapable dangers, Richard threw his rope, almost without looking, trusting to his luck and his sure sense of distance. Then he began pulling in, backing his horse in the brush. At the sudden resistance of the lariat, he felt the joyful assurance that he had caught his game. So savage was his joy that he pulled with both hands, though several groans escaped him for the pain he felt from the laceration of his shoulder.

And as a matter of fact the rope had caught both Manos Duras and Celinda, and suddenly they both tumbled backwards under the impact of a sudden pull.

The gaucho let go of Celinda so as to free both hands. Even while he was being drawn along the ground he managed to get at his knife, and cut the rope that bound him. But Watson had foreseen this, and running forward, dealt him several blows on the head with the butt of his revolver. Rojas meanwhile reached the tussling group and throwing his now useless weapon down, grasped his knife.

“Leave him to me, gringo!” he gasped. “I don’t want anybody to take this job from me.... I have a right to it!”

He pushed Watson vigorously out of the way, and the latter turned to Celinda, picked her up from the ground and carried her off to a distance of a few yards. She was so stunned by the fall that she did not recognize him, but stood, passing her hands over her forehead, and gazing blankly about her, while blood tricked from the cuts on her arms and face.

Don Carlos meanwhile was almost helping Manos Duras to get to his feet.

“Stand up, son of evil!... Or you’ll be saying that I am killing you without giving you a chance! Get out your knife, and fight, damn your soul!”

Manos Duras as a matter of fact already held his knife in his hand, but the rancher, beside himself at finally having the gaucho within reach, had not noticed it.

But scarcely had the bandit got a footing than he treacherously made a plunge toward his pursuer, trying to stab him below the belt. However, the blows dealt him by Watson had dazed him sufficiently to slow up all his movements, and the rancher had time to parry the blow with a back stroke of his left hand. Then don Carlos landed a thrust on the bandit’s chest, and another and another, in such swift succession that Manos Duras, blood pouring out from the numerous gashes he had just received, toppled over....

“The puma’s done for!” shouted don Carlos, holding up his blood dripping knife. The bandit, writhing at his feet, was uttering snorts of an agony that could only end in death.

Watson had led Celinda a certain distance away so that she should not witness this scene; but he had kept close watch of what was going on, ready to lend help if don Carlos should need it.

The two men helped Celinda to the spot where Watson had left his horse; in their anxiety lest she should see the bandit in his death agony, they almost carried her between them. But still dazed by the rapid succession of events, the girl looked about with vague dilated eyes as though she recognized nothing in her surroundings. Finally she burst into tears, and threw her arms about her father. Then, entirely unmindful of the attitude she maintained towards him when she was quite herself, she threw her arms about Watson, too, and kissed him.

Stirred by her unexpected caress, and distressed by the sight of the scratches and cuts on the girl’s face, Richard asked, anxiously,

“Did I hurt you, Miss Rojas?... But don’t you think I managed a little better with the lariat this time?”

Then the two men helped Celinda get on the horse and walked along beside her to Dead Indian ranch.

At sight of them, Robledo and the commissioner came out with a joyful welcome. In front of the ranch house stood the other men of the expedition, who, after attending in their own way to the wounds of their captives, were keeping watch over them, as well as over Piola. It had been decided to take them all to the jail in the capital of the territory on the very next day.

Meanwhile, Celinda, finding herself once more among friends, who were eagerly expressing their delight at her rescue, began to recover her usual spirits. She tried to hide her face from Watson, so that he shouldn’t see all the cuts that disfigured it; but at the same time she eyed him with a new tenderness.

“Did I really hurt you, ... Celinda?” the youth kept asking in an imploring tone, as though his emotions would not at the moment permit of his saying anything else. “But didn’t I do better with the lassoo? Didn’t I?”

After glancing about to see whether her father were near enough to overhear, she murmured, imitating his foreign accent,

“Clumsy gringo! Great big stupid! I should say you did hurt me, and you manage a lassoo as badly as possible.... But never mind! As long as you caught that bad man with me, and as long as I said that you’d have to catch me that way if you wanted me ... here I am!”

And puckering up her lips she blew him a kiss, as a kind of promise of what his reward would be when later they should find means of being alone.

At dusk the expedition reached La Presa, after a short halt at the Rojas ranch where they found Sebastiana. The half-breed, at sight of her young mistress, burst out into loud exclamations of joy, which later were transformed into cries of indignation when she saw the marks on Celinda’s face. In the midst of her indignant vituperations, the marquesa’s name escaped her, in spite of Robledo’s commands to her that she be discreet. And finally she ended up by telling Rojas all that she knew of the interview between the “seÑorona” and Manos Duras, and of all that she suspected it signified.

Sebastiana, quite as a matter of course, decided to remain at the ranch, and did not consider it necessary to ask don Carlos’ permission to do so. The rancher himself, however, urged Watson to stay with him until the following day, when he would accompany his guest to town.

“I have some urgent business to attend to at La Presa, just a few things to say to a certain person there,” said don Carlos in a voice so soft it was terrifying to hear. Robledo divining his intentions tried to dissuade him from the trip.

“Leave me alone, don Manuel. I’m going to see that woman. You know what she tried to do to my girl. All I want is to pick up her skirts and give her a thrashing with this whip of mine, so....”

And he snapped the leather thong of his short riding-whip.

Convinced finally that there was no deterring don Carlos from his purpose, Robledo finally consented to being accompanied by him to the settlement. The fury of his combat with the gaucho had not yet abated in Celinda’s father, but Robledo hoped that within a few hours it would have subsided a little.

When they reached the main street, the rescue party found nearly the whole population of La Presa assembled to meet them. The men, riding ahead, gave out the news of the skirmish as they passed by the different groups and their words sped through the crowd with startling rapidity. There was general and frankly expressed rejoicing at the death of Manos Duras, as though the town had by that event been freed from a dangerous menace. Some of the men went so far as to lament the fact that the comisario should have left the three prisoners under guard at Dead Squaw ranch until they could be conveyed to the prison of the territory. With that ferocity which always manifests itself in a crowd when finally it has been liberated from something that it feared, the men and women who had gathered to hear the news would have liked to tear these friends of the dead gaucho’s to pieces, in order to be avenged for the terror he had inspired in them when he was alive.

Suddenly the throng caught at something that promised the satisfaction of its most ferocious instincts. A few of Sebastiana’s words were repeated, and in a twinkling the whole story was out. So it was the great seÑora, the “seÑorona” who, with Manos Duras, had planned this terrible act of vengeance! A vengeance which seemed more like the horrible things they had heard tell of, or that they themselves had seen in the movies, than anything they had ever witnessed in actual life. To think that that white-skinned gringa had tried to kill the ranch girl, their own Flor de Rio Negro, daughter of the land and the friend of every one of them!

Robledo, on horseback, moving back and forth from one group to another, guessed from a few phrases caught at random that the anger rising rapidly in the crowd was assuming dangerous proportions. At that very moment they were passing poor Pirovani’s former dwelling. Some of the women began crying out shrilly as they looked up at the windows.

“Down with the painted face! Death to the murderous she-dog!”

The worst insults in their feminine vocabularies were hurled through the air. Anticipating what was going to happen, Robledo changed his course and went up to the house, backing his horse up against the outside steps. But for once not even those men who were most loyal to him supported him in his purpose.

Heedless of his advice as of his commands, women and children dove under his horse or slipped behind its flanks, and the invading movement having been started, the men thronged into the basement of the house, apologizing, with a lift of their caps, as they passed in front of the engineer.

The assault of the enemy’s quarters was very rapid, every obstacle in the way of the invaders being overcome with that ease which seems characteristic of popular attacks on days of successful revolutionary outbreaks. The front door fell in, shattered by a few determined blows, and the human tide eddied for a moment around the opening, then, in surge after surge, swept into the house. Broken panes fell out of the windows, followed by all manner of projectiles, furniture, clothes, dishes, and in vain did some of the more moderate members of the crowd protest against this senseless destruction.

“But this isn’t her house,” they were repeating. “This all belongs to don Enrique, the Italian!”

The crowd however turned a deaf ear. It preferred to believe that everything there did belong to the “seÑorona,” so as to be able to vent its rage without scrupling about other people’s property. And all the while they screamed out insults, in the hope that their words would scorch the “seÑorona’s” ears, just as they hoped that their hands might tear at her flesh.

But finally Robledo, still on his horse, calling out orders that went unobeyed, succeeded in gaining the attention of the crowd which had grown tired of its work of destruction. Its energies had suddenly diminished at discovering that its hoped-for victim was no longer within reach; but the real reason for its subsiding into a relative silence which allowed Robledo to make himself heard, was the arrival of an old Spanish laborer who had retired from the works at the dam in order to carry on the business of delivering water to his customers in the town. Prodding and cursing at the miserable old nag that unwillingly drew his ramshackle cart, containing a water-tank, he daily made the rounds of La Presa; and from this conveyance he now began haranguing the mob at Pirovani’s.

“What are you doing here, blunder-heads? She’s gone!” he yelled shrilly. “I saw her in a carriage with the seÑor Moreno, the government fellow. They were on their way to the station to take the train to Buenos Aires.”

At once some of the men who had horses within reach offered to start off in pursuit. They had lost a good deal of time, but perhaps if they rode without any regard for their mounts they might get to Fuerte Sarmiento in time to catch the fugitive....

But some of the others shook their heads. The train would go by within less than an hour, and as it started out from the neighboring town, it rarely reached Fuerte Sarmiento late.

But the women were insistent. Let the men who had horses try to get to the station and let them drag the “seÑorona” back by the hair ... and while they were screaming out what they would do if they had their way, some of the males of the party were expressing the opinion that it would be an excellent plan to take up a position along the railway track, and when the train came by, shoot.... They appeared to have quite overlooked the fact which Robledo tried to point out to them, that even if they knew which particular coach contained the marquesa, there would be other travellers in it, whom they would have little excuse for murdering.

Hoarse with shouting, and convinced finally that the hated woman was now beyond their reach, they lapsed into glum silence.

Robledo seized his opportunity.

“Let her go. When she goes, Gualicho goes, and he’s troubled us enough. What we want is to keep this demon from ever coming back. If only he had been driven out long ago!”

As twilight deepened, the mob grew calmer. Supper time came, and even some of the most excitable members of the crowd decided to continue their discussion of the story either at their own homes, or at the Gallego’s boliche.

Rojas, plunged in gloom, had apparently forgotten all the other events of the day, and could think of nothing but Elena’s having escaped him.

“But you don’t know how I feel about it, don Manuel!... I had something to say to her, by means of a whip.”

And with a gesture indicating how he would have done it, he went on explaining just what he considered justice would have demanded that he do to the marquesa.

From that day on, life in La Presa became a monotonous series of anxious days. Robledo was the only person of any importance left in the community. As operations at the dam remained suspended, the workmen began to drift away. Some of them, less impatient, spent their days in idleness, talking of the prospects of the Government’s ordering the works to begin again “next week.” But the order never arrived. Down there at Buenos Aires they were taking their time to consider the matter, and as the months went by, one after another of the workmen lost patience, and finally took up his pack again to escape, either on foot or by rail, from a place where there was no money coming in and where poverty was gaining headway like a plague.

The boliche had taken on a funereal appearance. Only a few of the old customers still came to toss off a drink before the Gallego’s counter. These were all men of assured solvency, don Antonio having abruptly cut off the credit of all his other customers; to back up this resolve he kept a revolver in his money drawer, and his handsome American rifle under his chair. When out of funds, his patrons amply justified all these precautions.

“You ought to go to Buenos Aires, don Manuel,” he kept saying hopefully to Robledo. “You’re the only man from these parts they’ll listen to up there.”

The engineer, however, was as disheartened and gloomy as his surroundings. The only thing that ever drew a smile from him was the changed aspect of his partner. Watson had suddenly developed a cheerfulness which seemed to indicate that the fate of his once beloved canals was nothing to him now. According to his frank confession, the only subject that interested him was cattle raising, and he spent all of his days at the Rojas ranch.

What was the momentary paralysis of the works at the dam to him! He was young, most of his life stretching ahead of him. Why not study cattle-farming in the meantime, especially as he had Flor de Rio Negro to teach him, as she rode by his side through her father’s fields from sunrise to sundown?

But an incident that occurred shortly after Elena’s flight had tinged everything with black melancholy for Robledo. Gonzalez had brought him a hat that one of his compatriots had found near the river, at a distance from the camp. The engineer had recognized it at once. It was Torre Bianca’s.

For some time he had felt certain that his friend was no longer alive. Often at night, when the financial difficulties in which the works were involved kept him awake, he reconstructed the events which one morning at dawn had made Elena’s husband leave the house of the friend with whom he had taken refuge.

There could be little doubt now. Torre Bianca’s body must be at the bottom of the river.

And so it proved. The owner of the boliche came to him again to tell him of the discovery made by some of the men who, being out of work, had gone fishing two leagues down the river. Near a reed-encircled island they expected to find some of the trout that often came down stream from Lake Nahuel-Huapi. And among the reeds they had noticed two long black objects swayed by the ripples—the legs of a drowned man.

Robledo had not the heart to examine the body, but his compatriot Gonzalez found evidence from the clothing that the drowned man was Torre Bianca.

After this, Robledo felt more inclined to yield to the Gallego’s insistent urgings that he go to Buenos Aires to make a plea for the continuance of the work on the dam. Recognizing the possibility of his being more useful to the despairing community in Buenos Aires than at La Presa, he started off for the capital and spent several months there, going from one government office to another, struggling with the entanglements of administrative red tape, and making a determined effort to provide resources in order to maintain his credit at the banks. But to his dismay he found that the business men who had up to that time given their support to his enterprise, were unwilling to put more money into the work, and little by little he became aware of the general distrust felt of everything connected with La Presa.

Winter came, and Robledo had not yet accomplished enough to feel justified in leaving Buenos Aires. There were days when, in a sudden spurt of optimism, he had hopes of accomplishing his purpose within the week. But when, armed with a new argument, he presented himself at the government bureaus, he was met with the set phrase, “Come back tomorrow.” And the tomorrow they meant, as he came to discover, was not the tomorrow following today, but something vague and nebulous in the future, a tomorrow that would never dawn.

One morning the papers brought news of the uneasiness felt in the river towns, at the unprecedentedly rapid rise of the Rio Negro. The tributary streams were all bringing down enormous quantities of water and it seemed impossible that the banks of the larger stream should be able to contain the rapidly rising torrent. And this was the state of things that he had come to warn the government about, this was the condition that his dam, had it been nearer completion, would have been able to control!

Then came a telegram from his friends in La Presa, excitedly imploring that he come back, as though his presence possessed a miraculous power over the forces of nature itself.

He reached the town during a spell of icy cold that made him shiver in the fur-lined coat he had worn during the sharpest days of the winter. The streets of the town were deserted. The houses of wooden construction, best fitted to keep out the cold, kept their windows and doors tight shut. The roofs of the adobe buildings were crumbling, and the hurricanes from the plateau-lands had torn out the wooden frames of the windows. There was no one in sight! The only inhabitants of the place were those who had been there before the dam had been begun. To the engineer’s eyes the place looked as though ten years had elapsed since he had left it.

For days at a time he stood on the bank watching the growing volume of water in the great stream. Then the current began bringing down trees from the upper reaches of the river, and Robledo’s helpless indignation grew as he saw the danger to which all the lower river country was exposed increasing hourly. And now it was no longer trees torn from the slopes of the giant Andes, but great round enormous boulders, hidden from view, on the sandy bottom, that the stream rolled furiously along down stream.

It was not so much the danger of flood that worried Robledo as the probable fate of the unfinished wall of the dam. Each morning, with the methodical care of a doctor testing his patient, he examined the great dike thrown from bank to bank, the magnificent dam which, so well planned and constructed, had been left unfinished by its builders, first because of their absorbing love affairs, then because of their mortal rivalry.

The wider arm of the dam had been completed to within a few feet of the smaller one, and over these two walls the rising waters poured their volume, marking the place of the submerged obstructions with whirlpools and hissing foam.

Like all men who lead a life of danger, Robledo began to be superstitious, and as he watched the peril that was assuming gigantic proportions, he found himself addressing vague, mysterious divinities, imploring them to wreak a miracle.

“If only we can get through this winter without seeing this wall crash,” he thought. “What luck ...!”

But one morning, quite as though it were one of these sand walls that children spend hours building, and then break down at one capricious blow, the flooding waters snapped off one end of the unfinished arm, and then broke it up as though it were the least cohesive and resistant of substances; and finally, those two submerged walls, in the building of which hundreds of men and thousands of tons of heavy, hard materials had been employed, those walls that had seemed as immovable as the mountains, rolled outward, then down stream, crumbling as they went, to be tossed in fragments on the banks and on the shores of the reed-grown islands.

Robledo threw himself down on the ground in a paroxysm of weeping. Four years of work had melted away like so much sugar before his eyes. “All to do over again ... from the very beginning!”

His fellow countryman, the owner of the boliche, saw ruin staring him in the face also. In that once prosperous establishment the money-drawer beside the counter was now empty; and with his customers had vanished all his hopes of transforming his sandy acres into fertile irrigated fields. He was a poor man now, poorer than when he had come to find his fortune in this accursed spot!

The Gallego was plunged in heavy gloom; but his faith in Robledo, and his desire to cheer him up, made the store-keeper try to appear optimistic.

“It will all come right some time,” he would say over and over again, but without conviction.

Don Manuel, however, as he watched the merciless stream continue its work of destruction, felt rage growing within him. He no longer watched the river. His eyes had the vague expression of one whose thoughts have wandered far, who sees what is hidden to others.

Canterac and Pirovani appeared before his mind’s eye as clear and distinct as though he had seen them only the day before. And then came a woman’s face, smiling, but with the look of one intent on mischief in her tawny eyes.

Through time and space this woman exerted her evil influence on this distant corner of the globe. She, not nature’s forces, was the real destroyer of the work of many men.

Robledo clenched his fists. He thought of Rojas, and of how the rancher had wanted to punish this woman with whip-lashings. At that moment he would have devised for her something far worse.

“Gualicho, accursed Gualicho! Betrayer and tormentor of men, destroyer of men and of things!... perish the evil hour in which I brought you here!”