“You are working too hard, and I don’t like to see you get so tired, gringo mio! There’s too much work here for one man to do. When is Robledo going to come back? He must be having a gay time over there in Paris!”
Watson, as she mentioned his partner’s name, caught up her serious tone. He was already back, the engineer replied, and might put in an appearance at any moment. As to the work, it didn’t seem so heavy to him. He had held more difficult jobs in other countries. Until the government engineers finished the dam, his work and Robledo’s would be comparatively light, since most of the ditches were ready, waiting for the water that was to pour through them.
They were moving along side by side now, unconsciously going toward the engineering camp. Richard, as he walked along, kept a hand on her horse’s neck, and looked up at Celinda, whose quick motions of her eyes and lips while she talked were often easier for him to understand than her rapidly uttered words. The peons, considering the day’s work ended, were putting their tools together. The rider and her escort, to avoid the groups of laborers returning to the town, took a path at some distance from the river, and wound slowly up the slope that led to the mesa.
As they ascended a spur of ground that was like a buttress in the great wall of parched clay, stretching as far as the eye could reach, they saw, far below them, the lake-like width of the river above the narrow point selected for the construction of the dam. The camp, a medley of strangely assorted buildings, scattered about without any attempt at order, contained adobe huts covered with straw, houses of brick with tin roofs, tents of dirty canvas, and, most comfortable of the lot, the portable houses occupied by the engineers, overseers, and other employees. Above all the other houses, one in particular stood out, a wooden building mounted on piles, with a porch running around all four sides. It was the bungalow that, a few weeks before, had been received at Bahia Blanca for Pirovani, the Italian contractor of the works at the dam.
The streets of this hastily improvised town were always empty during the day. But as dusk set in they began to be peopled by groups of peons who, returning from their work, met other groups and mingled with them, until finally hundreds of workmen were assembled on the main thoroughfare; and they were all going in the same direction.
A frame house, the only one that, in size, compared with the bungalow of the Italian contractor, was the goal of the slowly moving crowd. Above the door was a sign on which was written in ordinary long hand, “The Galician’s Resort.” The Galician was, as a matter of fact, an Andalucian, but it is the prevailing assumption in those regions that any Spaniard who comes to Argentina must by that fact be a Galician. “The Resort,” of course, was chiefly useful to the community as a saloon, but it also served as a store where the most diverse articles could be purchased.
A group of faithful customers occupied by right of their patronage the vicinity of the counter or “bar.” Some of them were emigrants who, once cut adrift from their native Europe, had wandered through the three Americas, from Canada to Tierra del Fuego. Others, half-breeds, or even whites, had, after a few years in the desert, returned to a state approaching that of primitive man; their features were harsh and hawk-like, their beards thick and rough, and on their long hair they wore wide-brimmed sombreros. Thrust negligently through their belts of leather adorned with silver coins, they carried their revolvers and knives.
Outside the café, waiting for their husbands, in the hope that the latter would not drink too much if they knew that their wives were waiting for them, or watching for the companions of their nights, were assembled the beauties of the settlement, half-breed women of a light cinnamon color, with eyes like coals, coarse hair of the thick blackness of ink, and teeth of a luminous whiteness; some of them were so fat they looked like the grotesque exaggerations of caricature; others were as absurdly thin, as though they had just come out of a town besieged by hunger, or as if they were being consumed by flames incessantly burning within.
And now lights were twinkling in the town, their reddish points piercing through the violet veils of the twilight.
Celinda and her companion were still watching the settlement and the wide spreading river in silence, as though afraid that the scene before them would vanish at the sound of their voices.