“On the other hand these millions may not come for many years! They may not arrive until I am at death’s door, and then my sister’s children, here in Spain, will have a good time with the money I’ve worked and sweated for in America....”
But Elena wanted to hear about his life in the Patagonian wilds, that immense plain swept in winter by freezing hurricanes that raise towering columns of dust, and whose sole inhabitants are bands of ostriches, and straying pumas, that sometimes, under stress of hunger, risk attacking a solitary explorer.
Human population had in earlier times been represented there by scanty bands of Indians who scratched a bare living out of the river banks, and by fugitives from Chile and the Argentine, driven through these desolate regions by fear, either of the victims of their crimes, or of the law. Gradually the small forts put up by the government for the troops sent from Buenos Aires to take possession of the Patagonian desert, were slowly converted into little villages, scattered about at distances of hundreds of kilometres through these wild and arid lands.
It was in one of these villages that Robledo lived, slowly transforming his workmen’s camp into a town which would become, perhaps before the end of half a century, a flourishing city. America is rich in such transformations.
Elena was listening delightedly, with the same pleasure she would have felt at the theatre or cinema in watching an interesting story unfold.
“That’s what I call living,” she exclaimed. “That kind of life is worthy of a real man!”
She turned her gold-flecked eyes away from Robledo to look at her husband almost pityingly, as if he represented all the weaknesses of a soft civilization which she hated—for the moment!
“And that’s the way to make money,” she went on. “Really the only men worth considering are those who win wars, or those who win fortunes! Even though I am a woman, I’d love a life so full of danger....”
Robledo, to protect his host from the implications of the enthusiasm she was rather aggressively expressing, began to talk about the less glowing aspects of pioneering; whereupon the Marquise admitted that her enthusiasm for a life of adventure was somewhat chilled, and ended by confessing that she really preferred the ease and elegance of her Paris.
“But how I wish,” she added, “that my husband liked that sort of thing! Conquering, by sheer force of will, some of the vast riches of this earth.... He would come to see me every year, I would think of him all the time he was away, and even join him out there for a few months! It would be so much more exciting than this life of ours in Paris—and then, at the end of a few years, there would be riches, real wealth, immense wealth, like that you read about, and that you so rarely see in our Old World.”