g, untameable spirits, of which the world has all too few, whose
love of truth and fair-play becomes, as it were, a master-passion, and
around whom cluster not only many of the world's good men, but--
unfortunately for the success of the good cause--also multitudes of the
lower dregs of the world's wickedness, not because these dregs
sympathise with truth and justice, but simply because truth-lovers are
sometimes unavoidably arrayed against "the powers that be."

"I don't know the merits of the case to which you refer," said Lawrence,
"but I have the strongest sympathy with those who fight or suffer in the
cause of fair-play--for those who wish to `do to others as they would
have others do to them.' Do the people of San Luis sympathise with
those of San Juan?"

"I know not, senhor, I have never been to San Luis."

As the town referred to lay at a comparatively short distance from the
other, Lawrence was much surprised by this reply, but his surprise was
still further increased when he found that the handsome Gaucho had never
seen any of the towns in regard to which his sense of justice had been
so strongly stirred!

"Where were you born, Pizarro?" he asked.

"In the hut where you found me, senhor."

"And you have never been to Mendoza or San Juan?"

"No, senhor, I have never seen a town or a village--never gone beyond
the plains where we now ride."

"How old are you, Pizarro?"

"I do not know, senhor."

As the youth said this with a slightly confused look, Lawrence forbore
to put any more personal questions, and confined his conversation to
general topics; but he could not help wondering at this specimen of
grand and apparently noble manhood, who could neither read nor write,
who knew next to nothing of the great world beyond his own Pampas, and
who had not even seen a collection of huts sufficiently large to merit
the name of village. He could, however, admirably discern the signs of
the wilderness around him, as he showed by suddenly pointing to the sky
and exclaiming--

"See! there is a lion!"

"Lions have not wings, Pizarro," said Lawrence, with a smile, as he
looked upward; "but I see, very high in the air, a flock of vultures."

"Just so, senhor, and you observe that they do not move, but are
hovering over one spot?"

"Yes, I see that; what then?"

"A lion is there, senhor, devouring the carcass from which he has driven
the vultures away."

In a short time the correctness of the youth's obse