“In the hut where you found me, senhor.”
“And you have never been to Mendoza or San Juan?”
“No, senhor, I have never seen a town or a village—never gone beyond the plains where we now ride.”
“How old are you, Pizarro?”
“I do not know, senhor.”
As the youth said this with a slightly confused look, Lawrence forbore to put any more personal questions, and confined his conversation to general topics; but he could not help wondering at this specimen of grand and apparently noble manhood, who could neither read nor write, who knew next to nothing of the great world beyond his own Pampas, and who had not even seen a collection of huts sufficiently large to merit the name of village. He could, however, admirably discern the signs of the wilderness around him, as he showed by suddenly pointing to the sky and exclaiming—
“See! there is a lion!”
“Lions have not wings, Pizarro,” said Lawrence, with a smile, as he looked upward; “but I see, very high in the air, a flock of vultures.”
“Just so, senhor, and you observe that they do not move, but are hovering over one spot?”
“Yes, I see that; what then?”