Every one instantly understood the case of this poor man, half crazed
at the sudden recollection of his wasted and ruined life, and it did
not seem right that he should bleed and perhaps die for such a cause,
and all at once there was a rush and the crowd thrust itself between
him and his antagonist and hustled him a dozen yards away. Then one in
the crowd, an old man, shouted: "Do you think, friend, that you are
the only one in this gathering who lost his liberty and all he
possessed on earth in that fatal year? I, too, suffered as you have
suffered - "
"And I!" "And I!" shouted others, and while this noisy demonstration
was going on some of those who were pressing close to the stranger
began to ask him if he knew who the man was he had forbidden to sing
of 1840? Had he never heard of Barboza, the celebrated fighter who had
killed so many men in fights?
Perhaps he had heard and did not wish to die just yet: at all events a
change came over his spirit; he became more rational and even
apologetic, and Barboza graciously accepted the assurance that he had
no desire to provoke a quarrel.
And so there was no fight after all!
The second occasion was about two years later - a long period, during
which there had been a good many duels with knives in our
neighbourhood; but Barboza was not in any of them, no person had come
forward to challenge his supremacy. It is commonly said among the
gauchos that when a man has proved his prowess by killing a few of his
opponents, he is thereafter permitted to live in peace.
One day I attended a cattle-marking at a small native estancia a few
miles from home, owned by an old woman whom I used to think the oldest
person in the world as she hobbled about supporting herself with two
sticks, bent nearly double, with her half-blind, colourless eyes
always fixed on the ground. But she had granddaughters living with her
who were not bad-looking: the eldest, Antonia, a big loud-voiced young
woman, known as the "white mare" on account of the whiteness of her
skin and large size, and three others. It was not strange that cattle-
branding at this estancia brought all the men and youths for leagues
around to do a service to the venerable Dona Lucia del Ombu. That was
what she was called, because there was a solitary grand old ombu tree
growing about a hundred yards from the house - a well-known landmark in
the district. There were also half a dozen weeping willows close to
the house, but no plantation, no garden, and no ditch or enclosure of
any kind.
