THE BAD WISHERS
OR days and days and for weeks and weeks Canassa and I rode to the south, and the only break in our days was when we changed our tired horses for fresh ones. That we did sometimes four times in the day. We had plenty of choice, for we were driving some three hundred mares and colts. Canassa was a gaucho, a plainsman, as we would say, and a most excellent horseman, so he made nothing at all of catching an unbroken colt with his lasso and saddling and riding it, doing his share of the driving with the horse new to saddle.
With so much of it I grew tired, and one night as we sat about our little campfire heating water for our maté, the tea we made from herbs, I said that I wished the job was at an end.
Canassa strummed his guitar awhile, then laid it aside and said:
“Wishes are no good and he who wishes, risks. For why? Whenever you wish, you leave out something that should not be left out, and so things go wrong.”
I told him that a small wish might be all right, but this he would not allow. Things had to go just so, he said, and no one in the world was wise enough to wish things as they should be wished. Then, in the way of the men of the pampas, he told me a tale to prove the truth of what he said, and this was the tale: