Two days we passed in Ytapua resting our horses, and I renewed my friendship with Enrico Clerici, an Italian, who had served with Garibaldi, and who, three years ago, I had met in the same place and given him a silver ring which he reported galvanized, and was accustomed to lend as a great favour for a specific against rheumatism. He kept a pulperia, and being a born fighter, his delight was, when a row occurred (which he styled “una barulla de Jesu Cristo”), to clear the place by flinging empty bottles from the bar. A handsome, gentlemanlike man, and terrible with a bottle in his hand, whether as weapon of offence or for the purposes of drink; withal well educated, and no doubt by this time long dead, slain by his favourite weapon, and his place filled by some fat, double-entry Basque or grasping Catalan, or by some portly emigrant from Germany.
Not wishing to be confined within a house, a prey to the mosquitoes, we camped in the chief square, and strolling round about the town, I came on an old friend.
Not far outside the village a Correntino butcher had his shop, a little straw-thatched hut, with strings of fresh jerked beef festooning all the place; the owner stood outside dressed in the costume of a Gaucho of the southern plains. I did not know him, and we began to talk, when I perceived, tied underneath a shed, a fine, dark chestnut horse, saddled and bitted in the most approved of Gaucho style. He somehow seemed familiar, and the Correntino, seeing me looking at his horse, asked if I knew the brand, but looking at it I failed to recognize it, when on a sudden my memory was lighted up. Three years ago, in an “estero” [62] outside Caapucú, at night, journeying in company with a friend, one Hermann, whose only means of communication with me was a jargon of Spanish mixed with “Plaat Deutsch,” we met a Correntino, and as our horses mutually drowned our approach by splashing with their feet, our meeting terrified us both. Frightened, he drew his knife, and I a pistol, and Hermann lugged out a rusty sword, which he wore stuck through his horse’s girths. But explanations followed, and no blood was shed, and then we drew aside into a little hillock, called in the language of the place an “albardon,” sat down and talked, and asking whence he came was told from Ytapua. Now Ytapua was three days’ journey distant on an ordinary horse, and I looked carefully at the horse, and wondered why his owner had ridden him so hard. He, I now saw, was the horse I had seen that night, and the Correntino recognized me, and laughing said he had killed a man near Ytapua, and was (as he said) “retreating” when he met me in the marsh. The horse, no doubt, was one of the best for a long journey I have ever seen, and after quoting to his owner that “a dark chestnut horse may die, but cannot tire,” [63a] we separated, and, no doubt, for years afterwards our meeting was the subject of his talk.
No doubt the citizens of Ytapua were scandalized at our not coming to the town, and the Alcalde came to interview us, but we assured him that in virtue of a vow we slept outside, and in a moment all his fears were gone.
Striking right through the then desolated Misiones, passing the river Aguapey, our horses almost swimming, skirting by forests where red macaws hovered like hawks and parrots chattered; passing through open plains grown over here and there with Yatais, [63b] splashing for hours through wet esteros, missing the road occasionally, as I had travelled it but once, and then three years ago, and at the time I write of huts were few and far between, and population scanty, we came, upon the evening of the second day, near to a place called Ñacuti. This was the point for which I had been making, for near it was an estancia [63c] called the “Potrero San Antonio,” the property of Dr. Stewart, a well-known man in Paraguay. Nature had seemed to work to make the place impregnable. On three sides of the land, which measured eight or ten miles in length on every side, forks of a river ran, and at the fourth they came so close together that a short fence, not half-a-mile in length, closed up the circle, and cattle once inside were safe but for the tigers, which at that time abounded, and had grown so fierce by reason of the want of population that they sometimes killed horses or cows close to the door of the house. A short “picada,” of about a quarter of a mile in length, cut through the wood, led to the gate. Through it in times gone by I often rode at night in terror, with a pistol in my hand, the heavy foliage of the trees brushing my hat, and thinking every instant that a tiger would jump out. One night when close up to the bamboo bars I heard a grunt, thought my last hour had come, fired, and brought something down; approached, and found it was a peccary; and then, tearing the bars down in a hurry, got to horse, and galloped nine miles to the house, thinking each moment that the herd of peccaries was close behind and panting for my blood.
On this occasion all was still; the passage through the orange trees was dark, their scent oppressive, as the leaves just stirred in the hot north wind, and fire-flies glistened to and fro amongst the flowers; great bats flew heavily, and the quarter of a mile seemed mortal, and as if it led to hell.
Nothing occurred, and coming to the bars we found them on the ground; putting them up we conscientiously cursed the fool who left them out of place, and riding out into the moonlight, after a little trouble found the sandy, deep-banked trail which led up to the house. All the nine miles we passed by islands of great woods, peninsulas and archipelagos jutting out into the still plain, and all their bases swathed in white mists like water: the Yatais looked ghostly standing starkly in the grass; from the lagoons came the shrill croak of frogs, great moths came fluttering across our path, and the whole woods seemed filled with noise, as if the dwellers in them, silent through the day, were keeping holiday at night. As for the past two days we had eaten nothing but a few oranges and pieces of jerked beef, moistening them in the muddy water of the streams, our talk was of the welcome we should get, the supper, and of the comfortable time we then should pass for a few days to give our horses rest.
We passed the tiger-trap, a structure built after the fashion of an enormous mouse-trap, of strong bamboos; skirted along a wood in which an ominous growling and rustling made our horses start, and then it struck me as curious that there were no cattle feeding in the plain, no horses, and that the whole potrero seemed strangely desolate; but the house just showing at the edge of a small grove of peach-trees drove all these speculations out of my head: thinking upon the welcome, and the dinner, for we had eaten nothing since daybreak, and were fasting, as the natives say, from everything but sin, we reached the door. The house was dark, no troop of dogs rushed out to bark and seize our horses’ tails; we shouted, hammered with our whips, fired our revolvers, and nothing answered us.
Dismounting, we found everything bolted and barred, and going to the back, on the kitchen-hearth a few red embers, and thus knew that some one had been lately in the place. Nothing to eat, the woods evidently full of tigers, and our horses far too tired to start again, we were just about to unsaddle and lie down and sleep, when a white figure stole out from the peach-trees, and tried to gain the shelter of the corral some sixty yards away. Jumping on horseback we gave chase, and coming up with the fugitive found it to be a Paraguayan woman, who with her little daughter were the sole inhabitants, her husband having gone to the nearest village to buy provisions, and left her all alone, warning her earnestly before he left to keep the doors shut during the night on account of the tigers, and not to venture near the woods even in daylight till he should have come back. Finding herself confronted by two armed, mounted men, dressed in the clothes of Correntinos, who had an evil reputation in Paraguay, her terror was extreme. Her daughter, a little girl of eight or nine, crept out from behind a tree, and in a moment we were friends. Unluckily for us, she had no food of any kind, and but a little maté, which she prepared for us. She then remembered that the trees were covered with peaches, and went out and gathered some, but they were hard as stones; nevertheless we ate a quantity of them, and having tied our horses close to the house, not twenty paces from the door, in long lush grass, we lay down in the verandah, and did not wake till it was almost noon. When we awoke we found the woman had been up betimes and gone on foot five or six miles away to look for food. She brought some mandioca, and two or three dozen oranges, and a piece of almost putrefied jerked beef, all which we ate as heartily as if it had been the most delicious food on earth.
To my annoyance I found my horse weak and dejected, and several large clots of dried-up blood under the hair of his mane, and saw at once a vampire bat had fixed upon him, and no doubt sucked almost a quart of blood. We washed him in a pond close to the house, and he got better, and after eating some of the hard and unripe peaches we again lay down to sleep. By evening the woman’s husband had returned, and proved to be a little lame and withered-looking man, mounted upon a lean and skinny horse. He undertook to guide us to Asuncion, remarking that it was twenty years since he had seen the capital, but that he knew the road as if he was accustomed to go there every day. With a slight lapsus this turned out to be the case, and just at daybreak we left the Potrero San Antonio, where once before I had passed a month roaming about the woods, waiting for tigers in a tree at night, and never thinking that, in three years’ time, I should return and find it desolate. It seemed that Dr. Stewart, not finding the speculation pay, had sold his cattle, and his manager, one Oliver, a Californian “Forty-niner,” and his Paraguayan wife, had removed to a place some twenty leagues away, upon the road towards Asuncion.