“One day I found him brushing the foreman’s hair, just for the joke of the thing, and shaping the fellow’s mustache, making it look like Kaiser Wilhelm’s. So I gave him a drink, I gave him all the drinks he could hold, because that’s the only way to make that kind of a fellow talk. And so I learned that this broken-down old drunkard was a German baron, once a captain of the Imperial Guard. He had gambled with some money left in his charge by his superior officers, and instead of committing suicide, as his family expected him to do, he came to America, where he began his career as a general. He ended up a useless, drunken, day-laborer.”
Seeing that Elena was interested, Robledo went on modestly,
“This German baron was a general in one of the revolutions in Venezuela. I, too, was once a general in another South American republic. I was even minister of war for ten days ... but they threw me out for being too scientific, and for not knowing how to handle a machete as well as my aides.”
Then Robledo went on to speak of another peon, a drunkard also, a silent gloomy sort of fellow, who had crawled into the camp up at the dam to die. They had buried him near the river, and Robledo had found some of the poor devil’s papers in the canvas sack the vagabond dragged along with him. He had once been a well-known architect in Vienna. One of the photographs among the papers was of a lady with an impressive head-dress and long pendent earrings, who looked very much like the murdered Empress. This was the architect’s wife. While her husband was accompanying General Gordon on one of his expeditions she had been killed in Khartoum, torn to pieces by the fanatics that the Mahdi was leading through the Sudan. The other photograph, that of a handsome Austrian officer, his white coat snugly fitted in at the waist, was the vagabond’s son.
“And it’s no use trying to reform those fellows,” said Robledo. “You may clean them up a bit, and make life a little more comfortable for them, you may preach to them about drinking less, and try in every way to help them ‘get back’—As soon as they are rested and begin to look a little happier, they come up to you some fine morning with packs on their backs. ‘Well, I’m off, boss! What’s due me?’ And it’s no use asking them any questions. Everything is all right, they have no complaints to make; but just the same they light out. No sooner do they get a few square meals than the devil who drives them round and round the globe suddenly remembers them and starts them off again. They know perfectly well that beyond the horizon line out yonder are the Andes, and beyond the Andes, Chile; and beyond that the Pacific and its islands, and then the crowding masses of China.... And so their mania for wandering awakens ... they must always see what is beyond.... They pick up their bundles and start out again, with hunger and exhaustion waiting for them out there.... They die in hospitals, or in the desert; and if they do not die but keep on, always following the ‘beyond’ that mocks and beguiles them, they turn up here again—but only because they have made a complete circuit of the globe.”
Now and then the two engineers spoke of their own lives. Watson’s history was of the briefest. Leaving his native California after graduating from Berkeley, he had taken up his engineering work in the silver mines of Mexico, and from there he had gone to Peru. Finally he had moved on to Buenos Aires where he had met Robledo, and it was there the two men had gone into partnership in order to carry out their Rio Negro enterprise.
The Spaniard did not like to recall his experiences in America before his arrival in Argentina. In that earlier period he had taken part in revolutions for which he felt nothing but contempt, becoming involved in them merely because of his desire for activity. For the same reason he had undertaken various business ventures only to discover in the course of them that he was being deceived and robbed, sometimes by his partners, sometimes by the government. Violent changes in his fortunes had thrown him from absurd abundance into abject want. But he avoided talking of all this, and most of his stories were about life in Patagonia.
Once he had crossed the enormous plateau which begins at the cut of the Black River and stretches toward the Strait of Magellan. He had started out on this exploring expedition after resigning his position with the Argentine government, and to avoid expense he had taken with him only a native peon and a troup of six desert horses capable of feeding on the rough weeds of the mesa. Robledo and the peon rode all day, changing horses at frequent intervals. The engineer had, with the help of some of his friends, made out a map indicating the springs, the only possible camping places.
For several years there had been droughts. On reaching the first spring Robledo found that it was very salty. He was accustomed to the brackish water which the optimism of the desert explorers considers drinkable; but the water in this spring was of saltiness that was more than he or the Indian with him could stomach.
They went on, confident that they would come upon a spring the next day. When they reached it they found that it did not contain salt water, for the reason that there was no water in it at all. So they continued across the plateau that was always endless and always the same. Steering their course by the compass, they suffered a thirst which made them walk with their lower jaws drooping, and through their eyes, starting from their heads, passed now and then the terrifying glitter of madness. And finally they had been forced to resort to a loathesome thing in order to ease the torment of their swollen tongues and throats with a little liquid.