Chapter Twenty Six.
Castizo’s Idyllic Home in the Cordilleras—Preparing for winter—catching and Breaking Wild Horses.
So long had we lazed on the Pampas and on the borders of the Cordilleras, that summer had almost fled before we reached Castizo’s mountain home. It is probably doing ourselves injustice, however, to talk of lazing on the Pampas. The time was well spent, for if there be any happiness of a solid nature on earth, I think it had been ours during those all-too-short summer months. If you were to ask me for an analysis of this happiness, I think I should reply that it resulted from that perfect freedom from all care which only a true nomad ever enjoys, from the constant chain of adventures and incidents that surrounded us, from the strange scenery weird and wild, from the beauty of the sky night and morning, and, above all, from the perfect, the bounding health we enjoyed, health that made us laugh at danger and consider troubles, in whatever shape they came, trifles light as air.
Castizo had told us often about his estancia in the hills. For many years he had gone back and fore to it from Santa Cruz. It was simply a craze of his, he said; a mere whim or fad. He dearly loved loneliness, and in his own little Highlands he enjoyed it to the fullest extent. He was never afraid of the Indians. Not that he considered them immaculate as to virtue, and the soul of honour; but because his person, intact and safe and sound, represented to them so much property. He never paid them wholly until they had returned with him to the little station on the eastern coast, and then great indeed was their reward.
But all independently of this, I am convinced that these poor Indians dearly loved their white cacique, and that apart from any financial consideration, any one of them would have fought for him until he fell and died on the Pampa.
Yes, Castizo had spoken much to us of his life and adventures in the mountains, but he had not described his little village. Therefore we were not prepared for what we saw.
First, then, we had to cross a wide, extended, open plain or pampa, so great in extent indeed that we began to think the wilderness had commenced again.
In the very centre of this plain was a broad lagoon, but how fed or dried we could not tell, for no stream ran into nor out of it. There it was, nevertheless, and all round its borders bushes grew, and a rank, rushy kind of vegetation with tall flowers, crimson, blue, and bright yellow. We noticed with pleasure, too, that there were both ducks and geese on it. On the plain, moreover, we shot several birds of the grouse species, though quite different from any I had ever seen before.
