“How do you know that?” questions Cypriano, who with Ludwig has been examining the Indian trail down by the water’s edge—apart from the gaucho, who had followed it up to the summit of the slope.
“Come hither!” he calls out. “Look there!” he adds as they get beside him, “You see that these tracks have the toes all turned down stream; which tells me the horses did the same, and, I should say, also their riders. Yes! Soon as out of the water they turned down; proof good as positive that they’ve gone along the riacho this side, and back again to the big river. So it’s no use our delaying longer here; there’s nothing farther to be learnt, or gained by it.”
So says Gaspar; but Cypriano, and also Ludwig, think otherwise. Both have a wish—indeed, an earnest desire—once more to look upon the tracks of the pony on which they know Francesca to have been mounted. And communicating this to the gaucho, he holds their horses while they return to search for them.
To their satisfaction they again beheld the diminutive hoof-marks; two or three of which have escaped being trampled out by the horses that came behind. And after regarding them for a time with sad glances, Ludwig turns away sighing, while his cousin gives utterance to what more resembles a curse, accompanied by words breathing vengeance against the abductors.
Rejoining the gaucho, all three mount into their saddles; and, without further dallying, ride off down the riacho, to make back for the main river.
But, again upon the latter’s bank, they find the trail blind as before, with nothing to guide them, save the stream itself. To the gaucho, however, this seems sufficient, and turning his horses’s head upward, he cries out—
“Now, muchachos mios! we must on to the salitral!”
And on for this they ride; to reach the point where it commences, just as the sun’s lower limb touches, seeming to rest on the level line of the horizon.
And now, having arrived on the edge of the salitral, they make halt, still keeping to their saddles, with eyes bent over the waste which stretches far beyond and before them. Greater than ever is the gloom in their looks as they behold the sterile tract, which should have shown snow-white, all black and forbidding. For the salitral, as all the rest of the campo, is covered with a stratum of mud, and the travesia across it has been altogether obliterated.
Gaspar only knows the place where it begins; this by the bank of the river which there also commences its curve, turning abruptly off to the south. He thinks the route across the salitral is due westward, but he is not sure. And there is no sign of road now, not a trace to indicate the direction. Looking west, with the sun’s disc right before their faces, they see nothing but the brown bald expanse, treeless as cheerless, with neither break nor bush, stick nor stone, to relieve the monotony of its surface, or serve as a land-mark for the traveller. And the same thing both to the right and left, far as their eyes can reach; for here the river, after turning off, has no longer a skirting of trees; its banks beyond being a low-lying saline marsh—in short, a part of the salitral. To ride out upon that wilderness waste, to all appearance endless, with any chance or hope of finding the way across it, would be like embarking in an open boat, and steering straight for the open ocean.