'These were some good specimens of the Lampyridæ, no doubt.'
'Well, perhaps; but having such a nice long name doesn't make them a bit less hideous to me. Then in the morning when I looked into the glass I didn't know myself from Adam. I had a black eye that some bug or other 188 had given me—I dare say he also had a nice long name. I had a lump on my brow as large as a Spanish onion, and my nose was swollen and as big as a bladder of lard. From top to toe I was covered with hard knots, as if I'd been to Donnybrook Fair, and what with aching and itching it would have been a comfort to me to have jumped out of my skin.'
'Was that all?' I said, laughing.
'Not quite. I went to take up a book to fling at a monster spider in the corner, and put my hand on a scorpion. I cracked him and crushed the spider, and went to have my bath, only to find I had to fish out about twenty long-named indescribables that had committed suicide during the night. Other creepies had been drowned in the ewer. I found earwigs in my towels, grasshoppers in my clothes, and wicked-looking little beetles even in my hairbrushes. This may be a land flowing with milk and honey and all the rest of it, Murdoch, but it is also a land crawling with creepie-creepies.'
'Well, anyhow,' said Dugald, 'here comes your mule. Mount and have a ride, and we'll forget everything but the pleasures of the chase. Come, I think I know where there is a jaguar—an immense great brute. I saw him killing geese not three days ago.'
'Oh, that will be grand!' cried Archie, now all excitement.
And five minutes afterwards Dugald and he were off to the hills.
But in two days more we would be off to the hills in earnest.
For this tour we would not of our own free-will have made half the preparations Moncrieff insisted on, and perhaps would hardly have provided ourselves with tents. However, we gave in to his arrangements in every way, and certainly we had no cause to repent it.
The guide—he was to be called our cacique for the time being—that Moncrieff appointed had been a Gaucho malo, 189 a pampas Cain. No one ever knew half the crimes the fellow had committed, and I suppose he himself had forgotten. But he was a reformed man and really a Christian, and it is difficult to find such an anomaly among Gauchos. He knew the pampas well, and the Andes too, and was far more at home in the wilds than at the estancia. A man like this, Moncrieff told us, was worth ten times his weight in gold.