CHAPTER X
A FEW months after the work in the camp up at the dam had been begun, the inhabitants of the various settlements along the Rio Negro began to talk admiringly of the Galician’s new “store” which had suddenly become the most handsome establishment of the kind in the whole extent of the territory; its contents were as novel and instructive as they were interesting.
In the early years of the settlement one of the first foreigners to arrive at the camp in search of work was an Englishman who for many years had been wandering from one end of South America to the other. The last place he had stopped at in his adventurous career was in the heart of Paraguay where he had traded with the savage tribes of the region. However, this traffic had not, it seemed, made him rich. In fact it had left him little but a souvenir of his life in the forest, four crocodiles from the great Paraguay River. The natives, in exchange for the white man’s neckties and suspenders, had stuffed the hard hides of these yacarés with straw, and had performed the same operation on a boa constrictor, several yards long, which was added to the Englishman’s collection.
While at the capital the wanderer heard of the great engineering work going on up at Rio Negro. There seemed a good chance of getting something to do there, so with all his stuffed animals he betook himself thither.
Within a few weeks, as a result of the sudden change from the torrid temperature of Paraguay to the harsh winter of Patagonia, and also of the fact that the Galician had given him far too ample credit at his store, the Englishman died of pneumonia complicated by delirium tremens. The worthy proprietor of the “Galician’s Retreat,” believing firmly in the sacred right of collecting money due him, and animated moreover by a sure instinct in decorative matters, in so far at least as his customers’ tastes were concerned, appropriated the four yacarés and the boa, and strung them up on the ceiling of his boliche.
As a matter of fact Antonio Gonzales, who was an Andalusian,—although according to well established South American custom no one thought of referring to him as anything but “el gallego”—could never look up at the enormous reptile dangling like a ship’s cable from his ceiling, forming curves and loops as it swung from beam to beam, without feeling a good deal of the Andalusian’s hereditary horror of reptiles.
But it pleased the more important patrons of the establishment to drink their liquor under this extraordinary ceiling decoration, and a business man must of course always sacrifice his own preferences and timidities when they clash with those of the public.
The deeply furrowed hide, so thickly covered with flies that they made a sheath over it, stretched diagonally across the ceiling, and each time the door opened and a stream of air poured in, swayed as though coming to life. The draught frequently shook off into the glasses of the customers some of the dead flies whose remains had been drying since the preceding season, or scales from the giant boa, or a fine powder that was a mixture of dry particles from the straw with which it was stuffed and the arsenic used to dry the skin. In the corners of the room were suspended the four crocodiles, black and with horny squares in their backs, revealing to the Galician’s customers nothing but the bright yellow of their bellies and the soles of their paws.
Whoever came near the boliche always stopped in to have a glass of something, and to admire these curiosities. As to reptiles, there was not in the whole of Patagonia anything more remarkable than a certain deadly little viper, short, wide-headed and fat, and looking much like a comma; so these imported monsters attained immediate and far-reaching celebrity.
The proprietor of the store, with the air of one who has seen a great deal of the world, would explain to the gauchos the customs of the animals balancing above their heads; he even went so far as to give his hearers to understand that he had had something to do with the perilous business of hunting them.