but he will not give in just yet. Unfortunate Gaucho! Pedro
the next moment slips in a sticky pool of his own blood, and Manuel's
knife is buried in his heart! "He is killed! Manuel has had a misfortune!"
exclaim the ring; "fly, Manuel, fly!" In another minute, and just as the
_vigilantes_ are throwing themselves upon their horses to pursue him, he
has galloped out of sight.

Twenty miles from the _pulperia_ he draws rein, dismounts, wipes his
bloody knife on the grass, and slices off a collop of _charque_, which he
munches composedly for his supper. Very likely this _misfortune_ will make
him a _Gaucho malo_. The _Gaucho malo_ is an outlaw, at home only in the
desert, intangible as the wind, sanguinary, remorseless, swift. His
brethren of the _estancia_ pronounce his name occasionally, but in lowered
tones, and with a mixture of terror and respect; he is looked up to by
them as a sort of higher being. His home is a movable point upon an area
of twenty thousand square miles; his horse, the finest steed that he can
find upon the Pampas between Buenos Ayres and the Andes, between the Gran
Chaco and Cape Horn; his food, the first beef that he captures with his
lasso; his dainties, the tongues of cows which he kills, and abandons,
when he has stripped them of his favorite titbit, to the birds of prey.
Sometimes he dashes into a village, drinks a gourdful of _aguardiente_
with the admiring guests at the _pulperia_, and spurs away again into
obscurity, until at length the increasing number of his _desgracias_
tempts the mounted emissaries of justice to pursue him, in the hope of
extra reward. If suddenly beset by seven or eight of these desert police,
the _Gaucho malo_ slashes right and left with his redoubted knife,--kills
one, maims another, wounds them all. Perhaps he reaches his horse and is
off and away amid a shower of harmless balls;--or he is taken; in which
case, all that remains, the day after, of the _Gaucho malo_, is a lump of
soulless clay.

Then there is the guide, or _vaqueano_. This man, as one who knows him
well informs us, is a grave and reserved Gaucho, who knows by heart the
peculiarities of twenty thousand leagues of mountain, wood, and plain! He
is the only _map_ that an Argentinian general takes with him in a
campaign; and the _vaqueano_ is never absent from his side. No plan is
formed without his concurrence. The army's fate, the success of a battle,
the conquest of a province, is entirely dependent up