[CHAPTER V.]
THE ROYAL ARMY.
We will abandon for some time the Guaycurus chiefs, to transport ourselves twenty leagues off, in the very heart of the Cordilleras, where were certain personages which have much to do with this narrative, and where, two or three days before that we have reached, events had passed which we must relate.
The civil war, in destroying the old hierarchy, established by the Castilians in their colonies, and in overturning ranks and castes, had brought to the surface of Hispano-American society certain persons very interesting to study, and amongst whom the Pincheyras undoubtedly held the most prominent place.
Let us state who were these Pincheyras, whose name has already several times been mentioned, and from whence came that dark and mysterious celebrity, which, even now, after so many years, surrounds their name with so much horror.
Pincheyra began, like the greater part of the partisans of this epoch—that is to say, that at first he was a bandit. Born at San Carlos, in the centre of that province of Manli whose inhabitants never bowed to the yoke of the Incas, and only submitted to that of the Spaniards, Don Pablo Pincheyra was an Indian from head to foot; the blood of the Araucans flowed almost unmixed in his veins; so that when he was outlawed, and constrained to seek a refuge among the Indians, the latter responded with alacrity to his first call, and came joyfully around him, to form the nucleus; of that redoubtable squadron which afterwards was to be called the royal army.
Pincheyra had three brothers. These men, who had gained but a scanty subsistence in wielding by turns the lasso and the hatchet—that is to say, in working on the farms and as woodcutters—seized the opportunity which their elder brother offered them, and attached themselves to him, in company with all the scapegraces it was possible to recruit.
Thus, the Pincheyras, as they were called, were not long in becoming the terror of the country that they had been pleased to choose as the theatre of their exploits.
When they had pillaged the great chacras, and put the hamlets to ransom, they took refuge in the desert, and here they braved with impunity the powerful rage of their enemies.