"The pulquero is right," said Panchito; "come on, then, if you are a man."
"Willingly."
The two gauchos, followed by their comrades, dashed out into the street. As for the pulquero, standing in his doorway with his hands in his pockets, he whistled a dance tune while awaiting the combat.
Panchito and Corrocho, who had already taken off their hats, and bowed with affected politeness to each other, after rolling their poncho round the left arm, in guise of a buckler, drew their long knives from their polenas, and without exchanging a syllable, stood on guard with remarkable coolness.
In this species of duel the honour consists in touching the adversary in the face; a blow dealt below the waist passes for an act of treachery unworthy a true caballero.
The two adversaries, solidly planted on their straddled legs, with bodies bent, and head thrown back, looked at each other attentively to divine movements, parry strokes, and scar each other. The other gauchos, with husk cigarettes in their mouths, followed the duel with unconcerned eye, and applauded the more skilful. The fight continued on both sides with equal success for some minutes, when Panchito, whose sight was doubtless obstructed by copious libations, parried a second too late, and felt the point of Corrocho's knife cut the skin of his face its whole length.
"Bravo, bravo!" all the gauchos exclaimed simultaneously, "Well hit."
The combatants fell back a step, bowed to the spectators, sheathed their knives again, bowed to each other, with a species of courtesy, and, after shaking hands, re-entered the pulquería arm in arm.
The gauchos form a species of men apart, whose manners are completely unknown in Europe. Those of El Carmen, the great majority exiled for crimes, have retained their sanguinary habits and their contempt of life. Indefatigable gamblers, they have cards incessantly in their hands; and gambling is a fertile source of quarrelling, in which the knife plays the greatest part. Careless of the future and of present suffering, hardened to physical pain, they disdain death as much as life, and recoil before no danger. Well, these men, who frequently abandon their families to go and live in greater liberty amid savage hordes; who gladly and without emotion shed the blood of their fellow men; who are implacable in their hatred; are yet capable of ardent friendship, and extraordinary self-denial and devotion. Their character offers a strange medley of good and evil, of unbridled vices and of real qualities. They are, in turn, and simultaneously, quarrelsome, indolent, drunken, cruel, proud, brave to rashness, and devoted to a friend, or patron of their choice. From childhood blood flows beneath their hands in the estancias at the period of mantaza del ganado (cattle slaughtering), and they thus habituate themselves to the colour of the human purple. Lastly, their jests are as coarse as their manners; and the most delicate and frequent of them is to threaten with a knife under the most frivolous pretexts.
While the gauchos, on returning to the pulquería after the quarrel, were bedewing their reconciliation, and drowning in floods of chicha the remembrance of this little incident, a man, wrapped in a large cloak, and with his hat pulled over his eyes, entered the shop, without saying a word, went up to the bar, took an apparently indifferent glance around him, lit a cigarette at the brasero, and with a piastre he held in his hand, hit the table three sharp blows.