twenty-foursouls. No women, no children, save those of the chief and his second incommand. Our cacique knew better than to encumber himself with many ofthese on the march.
That these Patagonians would remain faithful to us, we had little doubt.For, first and foremost, they are, on the whole, good-natured andfriendly to white men; secondly, they had only been paid in part, andwould not get the remainder of their stores till we returned to SantaCruz.
A glance at the map will show where this last place lies. But do notthink it is a town. At the time of which I speak, it consisted indeedof but one _estancia_, on an island. It has an excellent harbour,however, and ships in distress often come here. Others, again, comeregularly to meet the Indian tribes, and purchase from them skins,ostrich feathers, and curios.
There is a regular Indian encampment here. They all live in tents, andfor the matter of that compare favourably with the gipsies we meet onour own Scottish borders at home.
How sound one sleeps on the Pampas! I scarcely knew my head was on thepillow till it was morning again, dogs barking and yelping, Indiansshouting, horses neighing, and the bold, strong voice of the Patagonianchief as he harangued his men, heard high above all.
CHAPTER TWENTY.
A WILD RIDE--COOKING AN OSTRICH WHOLE--QUIET EVENINGS ROUND THE CAMPFIRE.
He was indeed a noble savage, this Patagonian chief. His name wasJeeka; at least it sounded like that. Peter said "Jeeka" was nearenough, and to give it a better ring we added "Prince"--Prince Jeeka.
Peter admired him very much, as all young men admire nobility of figure.
"I'll tell you what it is, Jack," he said to me to-day; "if I had afigure like that fellow, it isn't going to sea I'd be."
"What would you do?"
"Take to the stage. What an Othello the fellow would make! Look at himnow. What an air of quiet command, and such a voice! That is hisfavourite wife in the corner, with baby in her arms. She looks at himwith fondness, not unmingled with awe. Even the dogs are listening, asif they understood every word he said."
"It's more than I do, Peter."
In good weather--and this particular morning was beautiful--no one feelsinclined to laze on the Pampas. Your sleep has been sweet and sound;your breakfast, principally of meat, as fat as you please, has been ahearty one, yet you do not feel heavy after it. On the contrary youhave but one wish--to be up and away.
Our route to-day would lead us somewhat aside from this Rio Santa Cruz(the river of the Holy Cross), in a direction about west and by north,straight away, in fact, for the distant Cordillera range of mountains,which was to be our ultimate destination.
Ever since our start, and even before we started, we--Ritchie, Peter,Jill, and myself--had been practising morn, noon, and night with bolasand lasso. The latter needs no description, and a good horseman soongets up to throwing it well, although there is a danger of being draggedheadlong out of the saddle, when it becomes tightened between thelassoed animal and the thrower. The bolas are balls, two or three, ofeither stone or lead covered with skin, attached to the ends of someyards of thong. They are whirled rapidly round the head for a moment ortwo, then deftly allowed to fly off at a tangent, so that when they fallupon an animal, be it ostrich, guanaco, or even the South American lioncalled puma, they so hamper his movements that further flight is out ofthe question. The horseman speedily advances and puts a speedy end tothe creature's sufferings.
To-day the journey was a peculiarly arduous one. The sun was blazingdown from an unclouded sky, making it positively hot for the climate;but after being heated, when we stopped a short time the cold east windwent searching through bones and marrow. We felt, as Peter expressedit, "suddenly placed inside an American patent freezer."
The route was very rough: the same barren wilderness that we had beentraversing for days; the same sort of sand-clay or gravel, under foot;the same stunted bushes, grass and thistle tufts; the same stony ground,the same up hill and down dell, over banks, up steep terraces, acrossplateaus, down into cartons and past _salinas_, near which was a greaterabundance of vegetation, though nothing approaching to luxuriance.These salinas are salt lagoons or lakes. I feel sure, from theirappearance, many of them are the craters of extinct volcanos. Andindeed the whole country where we were to-day seemed as if at one timeit had been overflown by lava, and subsequently rent and torn byearthquakes.
Castizo told Jill and me that all the land here at various periods oftime had been raised from the level of the sea by the giant forces ofnature operating beneath, and that this accounted for the terrace-likeformation we now and then came to. But Jill and I were too young atthat time to study geology. Besides, we had no more love for "ologies"at this period of our lives, than we had when poor Aunt Serapheema usedto strike one o'clock on our knuckles at home. As we wanted to put asmuch land between us and the Atlantic as possible, we did not stayto-day for big hunting. Besides, we were not in the very best ofhunting countries yet, though we saw several herds of guanaco, and agood many ostriches.
We had one little hunt, however. It was disobeying the orders of ourcacique to break away from the line of march, but in this particularcase we could not well help it. Besides, if any one was to blame, itwas Ossian.
A fox, a huge beast like a wolf, ran across our path.
"Hurrah!" Ossian seemed to cry, "Yowff, yowff. Come on, Bruce. Here'sa chance!"
Away went the two dogs like two birds. Away went Jill after his petslike a third bird, while I brought up the rear.
We heard Castizo order a halt, so we thought it would be all right, androde heedlessly on after the dogs. We must have ridden fully two mileswhen we came up with Ossian. Poor Bruce was nowhere in it; near him laythe fox, dead. I speedily dismounted, and secured the tail, which Ifastened to Jill's saddle. Then Bruce came up panting, and complainedto us that his legs were not long enough. Guanacos, he said, were morehis form; and this proved to be true enough, for he afterwards provedinvaluable at this form of hunting.
As we were returning, we noticed an ostrich at some distance to theright. Our bolas were handy, and so off we went at a tangent, inpursuit. Another and another sprang up, and to my intense delight andJill's glory he succeeded in entangling one I shot the bird with myrevolver, but I think even now I see the wild and frightened look thepoor creature had in its quaint, queer face. We did not stop to possessourselves of any of the meat, but secured the feathers, tied them in abundle, and prepared to return in triumph.
Well, to retrace our trail was easy enough. We reached the spot wherewe had left our companions.
They were gone.
But where, whither? We could see the plains all round us when we rodeup to the top of a ridge for very many miles, but never a vestige of thecavalcade.
"Jill," I said, "we're left and lost."
"But they cannot surely have gone out of sight in so short a time!"
"Where are they then?"
"It seems to me as if the earth has opened and swallowed them up."
And that was really and truly what had happened, with this difference:the earth had opened thousands of years before, and our companions wereswallowed to-day. They were quietly preparing lunch down in the bottomof a green-carpeted canon.
We were very glad to find them, and Peter told us after, he had beenlooking out for us all the time from behind a boulder at the top of thebank.
When Prince Jeeka found out we had killed an ostrich, and had notbrought in the flesh, he was astonished.
"You young," he said, smiling, "young, young--" Then he ordered anIndian to go and find it; which he did, and not long after brought it tocamp.
Meanwhile the Indians had made a splendid fire in the lee of a rock,with roots and bushes pulled from the adjoining bank. I had once seenan ox roasted whole, but never before an ostrich.
The huge bird was speedily disembowelled. The entrails fell to theshare of the mongrel greyhounds, or coarse-built whippets, and a deal ofquarrelling they had over them. The blood was drunk by th
e chief andhis wives. It certainly did not improve their copper-colouredcomplexions. Meanwhile stones were heated and placed inside the bird,the whole being finally lifted on to the bright fire, and partlycovered. In about an hour it was cooked.
We were all hungry, and glad to share with the Indians. I cannot say Irelished it very much; but hunger is sweet sauce, and it is never halfso sweet as when squatting gipsy-fashion round a meal spread in the openair.
After a few hours' rest we went on again, and so on and on day afterday.
We seemed to be making forced marches, and seldom stayed to do muchhunting, except simply for sake of fresh meat.
Unless one keeps a diary on the road--and that is what neither Jill norI did--it is impossible to remember a tithe of the many little eventsthat happen, or the character of the scenery. During the first six oreight days of this journey, however, there was but one character in
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