greeing
with his chiefs. But day by day, she was finding in him something which
rather modified these impressions--his feminine fairness, except
where he was burned by the sun, the increasingly martial aspect of his
moustachios, the agility with which he mounted his horse, his air of a
troubadour, intoning with a rather weak tenor voluptuous romances whose
words she did not understand.

One night, just before supper, the impressionable girl announced with a
feverish excitement which she could no longer repress that she had made
a grand discovery.

"Papa, Karl is of noble birth! He belongs to a great family."

The plainsman made a gesture of indifference. Other things were vexing
him in those days. But during the evening, feeling the necessity of
venting on somebody the wrath which had been gnawing at his vitals since
his last trip to Buenos Aires, he interrupted the singer.

"See here, gringo, what is all this nonsense about nobility which you
have been telling my girl?"

Karl left the piano that he might draw himself up to the approved
military position before responding. Under the influence of his recent
song, his pose suggested Lohengrin about to reveal the secret of his
life. His father had been General von Hartrott, one of the commanders
in the war of '70. The Emperor had rewarded his services by giving him
a title. One of his uncles was an intimate councillor of the King
of Prussia. His older brothers were conspicuous in the most select
regiments. He had carried a sword as a lieutenant.

Bored with all this grandeur, Madariaga interrupted him. "Lies . . .
nonsense . . . hot air!" The very idea of a gringo talking to him about
nobility! . . . He had left Europe when very young in order to cast in
his lot with the revolting democracies of America, and although nobility
now seemed to him something out-of-date and incomprehensible, still
he stoutly maintained that the only true nobility was that of his own
country. He would yield first place to the gringoes for the invention
of machinery and ships, and for breeding priceless animals, but all the
Counts and Marquises of Gringo-land appeared to him to be fictitious
characters.

"All tomfoolery!" he blustered. "There isn't any nobility in your
country, nor have you five dollars all told to rub against each other.
If you had, you wouldn't come over here to play the gallant to women who
are . . . you know what they are as well as I do."

To the astonishment of De