His ranch-house, of adobe, was surrounded by other huts, or hovels, and a few corrals fenced in by old stockades, but only on rare occasions was any cattle to be found in them.
Everyone in the country knew where the ranch of Manos Duras was located; but very few ever cared to visit it, for the region had a bad name. Sometimes those who with a certain trepidation passed near by, felt reassured when they saw how solitary the place was. On the road leading up to the ranch house there were none of those barking and leaping long-haired dogs with blood-shot eyes and pointed ears who usually accompany the cowboy. Nor were any horses to be seen nibbling at the sparse grass in the corrals.
Manos Duras was away. Possibly he was roving up and down the banks of the Colorado where cattle were more abundant than along the Rio Negro. Or possibly he was roaming among the spurs of the Andes, going to pay a visit to his friends in the Bolson valley, settled for the most part by Chilian adventurers, or on his way to make a call on his acquaintances along the shores of the Andene lakes. These excursions of his to the mountains were usually undertaken for the purpose of disposing, in Chile, of the cattle he had “rustled” in the Argentine.
But at other times the Manos Duras ranch contained an extraordinary diversity of inhabitants. Wandering gauchos like himself took up their quarters in the adobe huts for weeks at a time without anyone’s ever discovering for a certainty where they came from nor where they were going.
The comisario of La Presa was beginning to feel uneasy about these mysterious visitors. He got little rest, for not a night went by that he did not fear that some scandalous depradation might occur. Yet day after day passed, and nothing happened to ruffle the calm of the settlement and its outskirts. At the gaucho’s ranch numerous heads of cattles were sold and skinned, and Manos Duras provided the whole region with meat. But, as no complaints of theft reached him, don Roque refrained from any investigation as to the source of the bandit’s flocks and herds.
Then one fine morning the gaucho’s companions disappeared, and Manos Duras continued living in solitude on his ranch; at last he too disappeared for a while, to the comisario’s infinite relief.
Suddenly he reappeared again, with three companions, evil-looking specimens out of whom no one could get a word. At the Galician’s it was asserted that they came from a distant valley of the mountain chain.
“They’re three good fellows who are out of luck,” said the gaucho. “Three pals of mine who are going to live up at the ranch until the white-livered rotters down yonder get through telling lies about them.”
One day of intense heat, Manos Duras sprang on his horse to go up to La Presa to make some purchases.
The Patagonian summer had begun with the violent ardor it displays in lands rarely cooled by rain, but where the winter temperatures go down to many degrees below zero. The parching soil seemed to tremble under the intensity of the sun’s hot brilliance. So strong was the radiation that straight lines took on a wave-motion in the dazzling glare, and the outlines of the mountains, the buildings and the people in the streets became oddly changed. These tricks of the blinding light doubled or even tripled the objects in the scene, giving the impression that this desert land was a region of lakes, where everything was reflected in a series of glittering surfaces. The mirages of the desert, these, which attract the attention of even the sons of the soil, so odd and capricious are the forms which these optical illusions assume.