“What would you do?”
“Take to the stage. What an Othello the fellow would make! Look at him now. What an air of quiet command, and such a voice! That is his favourite wife in the corner, with baby in her arms. She looks at him with fondness, not unmingled with awe. Even the dogs are listening, as if they understood every word he said.”
“It’s more than I do, Peter.”
In good weather—and this particular morning was beautiful—no one feels inclined to laze on the Pampas. Your sleep has been sweet and sound; your breakfast, principally of meat, as fat as you please, has been a hearty one, yet you do not feel heavy after it. On the contrary you have but one wish—to be up and away.
Our route to-day would lead us somewhat aside from this Rio Santa Cruz (the river of the Holy Cross), in a direction about west and by north, straight away, in fact, for the distant Cordillera range of mountains, which was to be our ultimate destination.
Ever since our start, and even before we started, we—Ritchie, Peter, Jill, and myself—had been practising morn, noon, and night with bolas and lasso. The latter needs no description, and a good horseman soon gets up to throwing it well, although there is a danger of being dragged headlong out of the saddle, when it becomes tightened between the lassoed animal and the thrower. The bolas are balls, two or three, of either stone or lead covered with skin, attached to the ends of some yards of thong. They are whirled rapidly round the head for a moment or two, then deftly allowed to fly off at a tangent, so that when they fall upon an animal, be it ostrich, guanaco, or even the South American lion called puma, they so hamper his movements that further flight is out of the question. The horseman speedily advances and puts a speedy end to the creature’s sufferings.
To-day the journey was a peculiarly arduous one. The sun was blazing down from an unclouded sky, making it positively hot for the climate; but after being heated, when we stopped a short time the cold east wind went searching through bones and marrow. We felt, as Peter expressed it, “suddenly placed inside an American patent freezer.”
The route was very rough: the same barren wilderness that we had been traversing for days; the same sort of sand-clay or gravel, under foot; the same stunted bushes, grass and thistle tufts; the same stony ground, the same up hill and down dell, over banks, up steep terraces, across plateaus, down into cartons and past salinas, near which was a greater abundance of vegetation, though nothing approaching to luxuriance. These salinas are salt lagoons or lakes. I feel sure, from their appearance, many of them are the craters of extinct volcanos. And indeed the whole country where we were to-day seemed as if at one time it had been overflown by lava, and subsequently rent and torn by earthquakes.
Castizo told Jill and me that all the land here at various periods of time had been raised from the level of the sea by the giant forces of nature operating beneath, and that this accounted for the terrace-like formation we now and then came to. But Jill and I were too young at that time to study geology. Besides, we had no more love for “ologies” at this period of our lives, than we had when poor Aunt Serapheema used to strike one o’clock on our knuckles at home. As we wanted to put as much land between us and the Atlantic as possible, we did not stay to-day for big hunting. Besides, we were not in the very best of hunting countries yet, though we saw several herds of guanaco, and a good many ostriches.
We had one little hunt, however. It was disobeying the orders of our cacique to break away from the line of march, but in this particular case we could not well help it. Besides, if any one was to blame, it was Ossian.