At this moment he saw, about ten paces from him, two eyes that shone like live coals, and looked at him with strange fixedness.
Don Torribio was a man of tried courage, audacious, and even rash on occasions; but alone in the gloomy solitude in the midst of the black night, surrounded by ferocious beasts, he felt fear assail himself against his will; he breathed with difficulty; his teeth were clenched, an icy perspiration poured down his whole person, and he was on the point of abandoning himself to his fate. This sudden discouragement disappeared before a powerful will, and Don Torribio, sustained by the instinct of self-preservation, and that hope which springs eternal in the human breast, prepared for an unequal struggle.
The horse burst into a snort of terror, and ran off.
"All the better," its rider thought, "perhaps it will escape."
A frightful concert of howls and roars broke out on all sides at the sound of the horse's flight and huge shadows bounded along past Don Torribio. A violent blast swept the sky, and the moon lit up the desert with its mournful, sickly rays.
Not far off the Rio Negro ran between two scarped banks, and Don Torribio saw all round him the compact masses of a virgin forest, an inextricable chaos of rocks piled up pell-mell, and of fissures out of which clumps of trees grew. Here and there creepers were intertwined describing the wildest curves, and only stopped their ramifications at the river. The soil, composed of sand and that detritus which abounds in American forests, gave way beneath the foot.
Don Torribio now discovered where he was He was more than fifteen leagues from any habitation, on the outskirts of an immense forest, the only one in Patagonia which no ranger had as yet been bold enough to explore, such horror and mystery did its gloomy depths appear to reveal. Near the forest a limpid stream burst through the rocks, whose banks were trampled by numerous traces of the claws of wild beasts. This stream served them, in fact, as a watering place, when they left their dens after sunset, and went in search of food and drink. As a living testimony of this supposition, two magnificent cougars, male and female, were standing on the bank, and watching with anxious eyes the sporting of their cubs.
"Hum," said Don Torribio, "these are dangerous neighbours."
And he mechanically turned his eyes away. A panther, stretched out on a rock in the position of a watchful cat, fixed its inflamed eyes upon him. Torribio, who was well armed according to the American fashion, had a rifle of wondrous accuracy, which he had leant against a rock close to him.
"Good," he said, "it will be a tough fight at any rate."