“Well, since the boss and I can’t get on together, I’m going to the dam to keep house for the Italian contractor!”
Rojas shrugged to indicate that she could go wherever she pleased for all of him, and Celinda followed her old servant to the front door.
The afternoon was half gone when Don Carlos, who had been taking his siesta in a huge canvas armchair, and reading several of the Buenos Aires newspapers, which the train brought out to the desert three times a week, left the ranch house.
Hitched to a post of the portico which shaded the door was a horse. The rancher smiled as he noticed that the animal bore a side saddle. In a moment Celinda appeared, wearing a black riding skirt. She tossed her father a kiss from the end of her riding whip, and then, without setting foot in the stirrup or accepting a helping hand, with one leap she landed on the saddle, and the horse started off at full gallop toward the river.
But his rider did not let him go very far. Celinda dismounted in a grove of willows where a second horse, the same one she had ridden that morning with a cross saddle, was waiting for her. Dropping her skirt and the rest of her feminine costume, she stood revealed in knickerbockers, riding boots, and a boyish shirt and necktie. She smiled as she thought of how she was disobeying “the old man,” as, in accordance with local custom, she called her father.
But how surprised that other man would be to see her in a feminine riding skirt! No, she didn’t want to surprise him that way.... He had always seen her in boy’s clothes and so he always treated her with the friendly confidence he would have for someone of his own sex. Who could tell what would happen were he to see her wearing skirts, just like a young lady? He might grow shy and begin being tremendously polite, and finally stop seeing her altogether!
So she left her girl’s clothes on the horse she had ridden to the willows, gaily mounted the other, and pressing her slim feet against his flanks, tossed her lassoo in the air, making spirals of rope above her head.
And now the Flower of Rio Negro was galloping along the river bank through the aged willow trees that droop their festoons of delicate green over the gliding water. This solitary river roadway, that stretched from the storm-beaten peaks of the Andes, on the Pacific side, to its wide outlet in the Atlantic, had been named Black River because of the dark-colored plants which covered its bed, giving a greenish tinge to the snow waters of the distant mountains.
The thousand-year-old erosion of the swift stream had cut a deep gash, two or three leagues wide in certain places, in the Patagonian table land. The river slid along through this cut between two banks of earth brought down by the stream in the flood season. These banks were of a rich and light soil, extremely fertile wherever the river water reached it. But beyond this point the ground rose to form steep, yellow, sinuous walls that gazed unblinkingly at one another across the gliding black water; and beyond these heights stretched the mesa, that region where icy cold alternates with suffocating heat, where hurricanes torment the harsh vegetation that will yield a living only to those flocks that can scour many leagues of that arid plain.
All the life of the region was concentrated in the wide fissure carved by the river waters across the desert. The two strips of soil on its banks represented so many thousand miles of fertile earth brought down by the river from its wanderings in the Andes. And it was in one part of this great cleft that the government engineers were at work in an attempt to raise the level of the waters the few yards necessary in order to inundate the adjoining lands.