During the voyage to the River Plate we planned the thing well out, and talked it over with our friends. They, being mostly of our age, found it well reasoned, and envied us, they being due at banks and counting-houses, and other places where no chance like ours of making money, could be found. Arrived in Buenos Ayres, a cursed chance called us to Bahia Blanca upon business, but though we had a journey of about a thousand miles to make through territory just wasted by the Indians and in which at almost every house a man or two lay dead, we counted it as nothing, for we well knew on our return our fortunes were assured.
And so the autumn days upon the Arroyo de los Huesos seemed more glorious than autumn days in general, even in that climate perhaps the most exhilarating of the world. Horses went better, “maté” was hotter in the mouth, the pulperia caña seemed more tolerable, and the “China” girls looked more desirable than usual, even to philosophers who had their fortunes almost as good as made.
Our business in the province of Buenos Ayres done, and by this time I have forgotten what it was, we sold our horses, some of the best I ever saw in South America, for whatever they would fetch, and in a week found ourselves in Durazno, a little town in Uruguay, where in the camps surrounding, horses and mules were cheap.
About a league outside the town, and in a wooded elbow of the river Yi, lived our friend Don Guillermo. I myself years before had helped to build his house; and in and out of season, no matter if I arrived upon a “pingo” shining with silver gear, or on a “mancaron” with an old saddle topped by a ragged sheepskin, I was a welcome guest.
Ah! Don Guillermo, you and your brother Don Tomas rise also through the mist of twenty years.
Catholics, Scotchmen, and gentlemen, kindly and hospitable, bold riders and yet so religious that, though it must have been a purgatory to them as horsemen, they used to trudge on foot to mass on Sunday, swimming the Yi when it was flooded, with their clothes and missals on their heads, may God have pardoned you.
Not that the sins of either of them could have been great, or of the kind but that the briefest sojourn in purgatory should not have wiped them out.
To those rare Catholic families in Scotland an old-world flavour clings. When Knox and that “lewid monk,” the Regent Murray, all agog for progress and so-called purer worship, pestered and bothered Scotland into a change of faith, those few who clung to Catholicism seemed to become repositories of the traditions of an older world.
Heaven and hell, no resting-place for the weaker souls between, have rendered Scotland a hard place for the ordinary man who wants his purgatory, even if by another name. Surely our Scottish theologians had done well, although they heated up our hell like a glass furnace, to leave us purgatory; that is if “Glesca” be not purgatory enough even for those who, like North Britons, have no doubt on any subject either in heaven above, or in the earth below. So to the house of Don Guillermo—even the name has now escaped me, though I see it, mud-built and thatched with “paja,” standing on a little sandy hill, surrounded on two sides by wood, on the others looking straight out upon the open “camp”—hot foot we came. Riding upon two strayed horses known as “ajenos,” bought for a dollar each in Durazno, we arrived, carrying our scanty property in saddle-bags, rode to the door, called out “Hail, Mary!” after the fashion of the country and in deference to the religion of our hosts, which was itself of so sincere a caste that every one attempted to conform to it, as far as possible, whilst in their house; received the answer “Without sin conceived”; got off, and straightway launched into a discussion of our plan.
Assembled in the house were Wycherley, Harrington and Trevelyan, and other commentators, whose names have slipped my mind. Some were “estancieros,” that is cattle or sheep farmers; others again were loafers, all mostly men of education, with the exception of Newfoundland Jack, a sailor, who had left the navy in a hurry, after some peccadillo, but who, once in the camp, took a high place amongst men, by his knowledge of splicing, making turks’ heads, and generally applying all his acquired sea-lore to saddlery, and from a trick he had of forcing home his arguments with a short knife, the handle fixed on with a raw cow’s tail, and which in using he threw from hand to hand, and generally succeeded in burying deeply in his opponent’s chest. Our friends all liked the scheme, pronounced it practical and businesslike, and, to show goodwill, despatched a boy to town to bring a demijohn of caña back at full speed, instructing him to put it down to our account, not to delay upon the way, and to be careful no one stole it at the crossing of the Yi.