He always has a long list of potential employees. He is good pay. And yet I know a smallish man back home who gets exactly 10 times the money that this man pays his overseer per month. Now maybe you can begin to account for those beautiful gardens, those precision trimmed hedges, that spick and span house, those neat walks, weedless lawn, splendidly cooked meals faultlessly served, and so ad infinituma seeming inexhaustible supply of fabulously cheap man and woman power by our standards. Not so much down here by Chilean standards, in Chilean money, made in Chile.
Our room in the Carrera Hotel in Santiago with twin beds, tub and shower, service galore, large, airy and well-appointed in every way, on the 14th floor with French windows and magnificent view— a splendid room in probably the biggest and best hotel in town— cost us 606 pesos per day, sales tax and tips included. In our money, as we exchanged it, that means $6.06. Even a Durham wouldn't kick on that.
We will get back to the fundo and go out the front door, make a right angle and have a look. Below and directly in front are the barns, barn lots, drives, pens, slaughterhouse, enormous two story wheat granary, potato houses, stables, sheds, blacksmith shop, lumber room and sawmill pretty well equipped to make any wooden thing a farm needs, the Delco building, the flour mill, the cheese factory and probably a lot of other "small stuff' like that.
He had six riding horses in one stable when I looked in. Two of them were thoroughbred Chilean horses he seemed rather proud of, although he is extremely modest about what he owns. Aura May went riding to the nearby Indian town and back on the big hills, taking a look at the Pacific Ocean off there to the west about two miles.
Beyond the aforementioned barns and so forth is the highway, and beyond that is near 2,000 acres of about the finest bottom land in all Chile. It is supreme. It extends over a mile to the river and almost three miles up and down, to a very small town, Nehuentue, his post office. The river is rather narrow, but deep and navigable—salt water up past him, and with a small tide, say two feet. He has his own private dock on the river where he loads his wheat, potatoes, cattle, sheep and whatever else he may want to ship.
He appears to think his livestock is a small part of the fundo. And yet, when he got the idea I thought a good deal of cattle, he took Sugar Foot and me into a pasture of an excellent sort of strange grass where he had 50 or 60 grassers he expected to weigh 1,000 pounds by cold weather—next July or August. They were of all colors and duo colors, but good boned, uniform, and in good flesh—the best I had seen. I saw perhaps another 300 animals, 40 or 50 good-sized hogs and a good many sheep. And still, he isn't in the livestock business—much.
THE MISSING PURSE
Early Christmas Day afternoon, we started to Temuco to catch the train back to Santiago. We had one of the four compartments on that long steam locomotived train, which arrived in Santiago the next morning at 10 a.m.
We stepped jauntily into a well worn taxi and started for the Carrera Hotel when Aura May jumped straight up. Where was her purse, her passport, over $300 in U.S. currency, about 3,000 pesos in Chilean money, the ship tickets to Panama, the flying machine tickets to Los Angeles, her hair tinware and other feminine goods and wares too numerous to mention? We got the driver turned around and back. The train was still standing in the shed. I had to watch the baggage to save what we had left. Aura May took off like a teal at Le Pas, Manitoba, five days after opening day. She flew past the gate man like he wasn't there. Gate men seem to know when women mean business. The last I saw, she was headed down the right platform.
To me a long time elapsed. . . Then here she came—with the purse, shoulder sling and all, intact except for a few hundred pesos she, in her gratitude, had scattered to whomsoever would take them.