Gandara's Horses Were Strangely Coloured By Nature Aided By Artificial Selection, And I Remember That As A Boy I Thought Them Very Beautiful.

Sometimes it was a black- or brown- or bay-and-white, or a chestnut- or silver-grey- or strawberry-red-and-white, but the main point was the pleasing arrangement and shading of the dark colour.

Some of his best selected specimens were iron- or blue-grey- and-white; others, finer still, fawn-and-white and dun-and-white, and the best of all, perhaps, white and a metallic tawny yellow, the colour the natives call bronze or brassy, which I never see in England. Horses of this colour have the ears edged and tipped with black, the muzzle, fetlocks, mane, and tail also black. I do not know if he ever succeeded in breeding a tortoiseshell.

Gandara's pride in the horses he rode himself - the rare blooms selected from his equine garden - showed itself in the way in which he decorated them with silver headstalls and bit and the whole gear sparkling with silver, while he was careless of his own dress, going about in an old rusty hat, unpolished boots, and a frayed old Indian poncho or cloak over his gaucho garments. Probably the most glorious moment of his life was when he rode to a race-meeting or cattle- marking or other gathering of the gaucho population of the district, when all eyes would be turned to him on his arrival. Dismounting, he would hobble his horse, tie the glittering reins to the back of the saddle, and leave him proudly champing his big native bit and tossing his decorated head, while the people gathered round to admire the strangely-coloured animal as if it had been a Pegasus just alighted from the skies to stand for a while exhibiting itself among the horses of the earth.

My latest recollections of La Tapera are concerned more with Demetria than the piebalds. She was not an elegant figure, as was natural in a daughter of the grotesque Don Gregorio, but her countenance, as I have said, was attractive on account of its colour and gentle wistful expression, and being the daughter of a man rich in horses she did not want for lovers. In those far-off days the idle, gay, well-dressed young gambler was always a girl's first and often most successful wooer, but at La Tapera the young lovers had to reckon with one who, incredible as it seemed in a gaucho, hated gambling and kept a hostile and rather terrifying eye on their approaches. Eventually Demetria became engaged to a young stranger from a distance who had succeeded in persuading the father that he was an eligible person and able to provide for a wife.

Now it happened that the nearest priest in our part of the country lived a long distance away, and to get to him and his little thatched chapel one had to cross a swamp two miles wide in which one's horse would sink belly-deep in miry holes at least a dozen times before one could get through. In these circumstances the Gandara family could not go to the priest, but managed to persuade him to come to them, and as La Tapera was not considered a good enough place in which to hold so important a ceremony, my parents invited them to have the marriage in our house. The priest arrived on horseback about noon on a sultry day, hot and tired and well splashed with dried mud, and in a rather bad temper. It must also have gone against him to unite these young people in the house of heretics who were doomed to a dreadful future after their rebellious lives had ended. However, he got through with the business, and presently recovered his good temper and grew quite genial and talkative when he was led into the dining-room and found a grand wedding-breakfast with wine in plenty on the table. During the breakfast I looked often and long at the faces of the newly-married pair, and pitied our nice gentle Demetria, and wished she had not given herself to that man. He was not a bad-looking young man and was well-dressed in the gaucho costume, but he was strangely silent and ill at ease the whole time and did not win our regard. I never saw him again. It soon came out that he was a gambler and had nothing but his skill with a pack of cards to live by, and Don Gregorio in a rage told him to go back to his native place. And go he did very soon, leaving poor Demetria on her parents' hands.

Shortly after this unhappy experience Don Gregorio bought a house in Buenos Ayres for his wife and daughters, so that they could go and spend a month or two when they wanted a change, and I saw them on one or two occasions when in town. He himself would have been out of his element in such a place, shut up in a close room or painfully waddling over the rough boulder-stones of the narrow streets on his bow legs. Life for him was to be on the back of a piebald horse on the wide green plain, looking after his beloved animals.

CHAPTER XII

THE HEAD OF A DECAYED HOUSE

The Estancia Canada Seca - Low lands and floods - Don Anastacio, a gaucho exquisite - A greatly respected man - Poor relations - Don Anastacio a pig-fancier - Narrow escape from a pig - Charm of the low green lands - The flower called _macachina_ - A sweet-tasting bulb - Beauty of the green flower-sprinkled turf - A haunt of the golden plover - The _Bolas_ - My plover-hunting experience - Rebuked by a gaucho - A green spot, our playground in summer and lake in winter - The venomous toad-like Caratophrys - Vocal performance of the toad-like creature - We make war on them - The great lake battle and its results.

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