The girls who were not dancing clapped their hands continuously, emphasizing the purring rhythm of the guitars. Now and then one of them would sing a couplet of the “cueca,” at which the men would shout and toss up their hats.
A horseman dismounted in front of the tavern. He tied his mount to a post of the leaf screen, and came in, receiving full in his face as he stood in the door, the red light of the lamps that hung from the ceiling. The newcomer, whom the men greeted with respect, might have been about thirty years of age. Like all the other horsemen of the region, he wore a poncho and heavy spurs; his hair and beard were long, and his sharply outlined profile might have been taken for that of an Arab. Although handsome, his bearing was harsh and repellent, and in his black eyes shone at times an expression that was both imperious and cruel. This was “Manos Duras,” notorious in the territory, and a somewhat disquieting neighbor, for he lived from the sale of cattle; but no one had ever been able to discover where he bought his steers.
The proprietor made haste to offer him a glass of gin, while even the roughest looking gauchos raised a hand to their hats as though he were their chief. The Galicians looked curiously at him, repeating his name to one another, while the mestizas went towards him smiling like slave-girls.
Manos Duras accepted this reception somewhat haughtily. One of the women, eager to provide him with a seat of honor, dragged out another horse-skull, on which the fear-inspiring gaucho sat down, while the patrons of the tavern squatted around him on the floor.
The “cueca,” interrupted for a moment by this arrival, went on again, and did not stop even at the entrance of another personage of important demeanor, to whom, as soon as he appeared on the threshold, the tavern-keeper began bowing most respectfully, from the other side of the bar.
This was Don Roque, Commissioner of Police at the dam, and the only representative of Argentine authority in the settlement. As the governor of the territory of Rio Negro lived in a town on the Atlantic, which it required a journey of twelve days on horseback to reach—six times what it required to go to Buenos Aires by train—the Commissioner, who was his representative, enjoyed an ample freedom for the simple reason that he was forgotten. The Governor lived too far away to send for him, and the Minister of the Interior, who resided in the capitol of the Republic, did not deign even to notice the Commissioner’s existence.
As a matter of fact he did not abuse his authority, nor did he have at his disposal the means of making others feel it too heavily. Fat, good-natured, and of somewhat rustic manners, he was a native of Buenos Aires, who, falling on evil days, had been forced to ask for a government job, and had resigned himself to accepting the one offered him in Patagonia. He wore city clothes, adapted, however, to the discharge of his duties by the addition of high boots and a wide-brimmed sombrero. A revolver in full view on his waistcoat was the only insignia of authority he displayed.
The proprietor handed out his best chair, kept under the counter for guests of unusual distinction, and the commissioner set it down near Manos Duras, who, by way of acknowledging the Police Commissioner’s presence removed his hat but did not stir from the horse skull in which he was sitting.
The dance went on. Don Roque was puffing with great satisfaction at a huge cigar, which the gaucho, in a lordly manner, had offered.
“Do you know,” said the Commissioner, speaking in a low tone, “they say you’re the fellow who stole three steers from the Pozo Verde ranch last week. That’s outside my jurisdiction, since it’s in the Rio Colorado limits, but my associate, the commissioner over that way, thinks you’re the one that did it.”