The tug-boat slowed a little, and a canoe was slowly paddled out to pilot her into the little haven made by the brook that flowed down through the valley to the Uruguay.
Sticking out like a fishing-rod, over the stem of the canoe was a long cane, to sound with if it was required.
The group of horsemen on the bluff rode slowly down towards the river’s edge to watch the evolutions of the tug, and to hold back the horses when they should be disembarked. By this time she had got so near that we could see the horses’ heads looking out wildly from the sparred sides of the great decked lighters, and hear the thunderous noise their feet made tramping on the decks. Passing the bay, into which ran the stream, by about three hundred yards, the tug cast off one of the lighters she was towing, in a backwater. There it remained, the current slowly bearing it backwards, turning round upon itself. In the wild landscape, with ourselves upon our horses forming the only human element, the gigantic lighter with its freight of horses looked like the ark, as set forth in some old-fashioned book on Palestine. Slowly the tug crept in, the Indian-looking pilot squatted in his canoe sounding assiduously with his long cane. As the tug drew about six feet of water and the lighter not much more than three, the problem was to get the lighter near enough to the bank, so that when the hawser was cast off she would come in by her own way. Twice did the tug ground, and with furious shoutings and with all the crew staving on poles, was she got off again. At last the pilot found a little deeper channel, and coming to about some fifty feet away, lying a length or two above the spot where the stream entered the great river, she paid her hawser out, and as the lighter drifted shorewards, cast it off, and the great ark, with all its freight, grounded quite gently on the little sandy beach. The Italian captain of the tug, a Genoese, with his grey hair as curly as the wool on a sheep’s back, wearing a pale pink shirt, neatly set off with yellow horseshoes, and a blue gauze necktie tied in a flowing bow, pushed off his dirty little boat, rowed by a negro sailor and a Neapolitan, who dipped their oars into the water without regard to one another, either as to time or stroke.
The captain stepped ashore, mopping his face with a yellow pocket-handkerchief, and in the jargon between Spanish and Italian that men of his sort all affect out in the River Plate, saluted us, and cursed the river for its sandbanks and its turns, and then having left it as accursed as the Styx or Periphlegethon, he doubly cursed the Custom House, which, as he said, was all composed of thieves, the sons of thieves, who would be certainly begetters of the same. Then he calmed down a little, and drawing out a long Virginia cigar, took out the straw with seriousness and great dexterity, and then allowed about a quarter of an inch of it to smoulder in a match, lighted it, and sending out a cloud of smoke, sat down upon the grass, and fell a-cursing, with all the ingenuity of his profession and his race, the country, the hot weather, and the saints.
This done, and having seen the current was slowly bearing down the other lighter past the sandy beach, with a last hearty curse upon God’s mother and her Son, whose birth he hinted not obscurely was of the nature of a mystery, in which he placed no credence, got back into his boat, and went back to his tug, leaving us all amazed, both at his fluency and faith.
When he had gone and grappled with the other lighter which was slowly drifting down the stream, two or three men came forward in the lighter that was already in the little river’s mouth, about a yard or so distant from the edge, and calling to us to be ready, for the horses had not eaten for sixteen hours at least, slowly let down the wooden landing-flap. At first the horses craned their necks and looked out on the grass, but did not venture to go down the wooden landing-stage; then a big roan, stepping out gingerly and snorting as he went, adventured, and when he stood upon the grass, neighed shrilly and then rolled. In a long string the others followed, the clattering of their unshod feet upon the wood sounding like distant thunder.
Byrne, the Porteño, stout and high-coloured, dressed in great thigh boots and baggy breeches, a black silk handkerchief tied loosely round his neck, a black felt hat upon his head, and a great silver watch-chain, with a snaffle-bridle in the middle of it, contrasting oddly with his broad pistol belt, with its old silver dollars for a fastening, came ashore, carrying his saddle on his back. Then followed Doherty, whose name, quite unpronounceable to men of Latin race, was softened in their speech to Duarte, making a good Castilian patronymic of it. He too was a Porteño, [22] although of Irish stock. Tall, dark, and dressed in semi-native clothes, he yet, like Byrne, always spoke Spanish when no foreigners were present, and in his English that softening of the consonants and broadening of the vowels was discernible that makes the speech of men such as himself have in it something, as it were, caressing, strangely at variance with their character. Two or three peons of the usual Gaucho type came after them, all carrying saddles, and walking much as an alligator waddles on the sand, or as the Medes whom Xenophon describes, mincing upon their toes, in order not to blunt the rowels of their spurs.
Our men, Garcia the innkeeper of Fray Bentos, with Pablo Suarez, whose negro blood and crispy hair gave him a look as of a Roman emperor of the degenerate times, with Pancho Arrellano and Miguel Paralelo, the Gaucho dandy, swaying upon his horse with his toes just touching his heavy silver stirrups with a crown underneath them, Velez and El Pampita, an Indian who had been captured young on the south Pampa, were mounted ready to round the horses up.
They did not want much care, for they were eating ravenously, and all we had to do was to drive them a few hundred yards away to let the others land.
By this time the Italian captain in his tug had gently brought the other lighter to the beach, and from its side another string of horses came out on to the grass. They too all rolled, and, seeing the other band, by degrees mixed with it, so that four hundred horses soon were feeding ravenously on the sweet grass just at the little river’s mouth that lay between its banks and the thick belt of wood.