And burning houses, killing or driving
off the cattle, and so on. Our house was unfortunately on the main
road running south from the capital, and directly in the way of the
coming rabble. That the danger was a real and very great one we could
see in the anxious faces of our elders; besides, nothing was now
talked of but the coming army and of all we had to fear.
At this juncture my brother took it upon himself to make preparations
for the defence of the house Our oldest brother was away, shut up in
the besieged city, but the three of us at home determined to make a
good fight, and we set to work cleaning and polishing up our firearms-
the Tower musket, the awful blunderbuss, the three fowling-pieces,
double and single-barrelled, and the two big horse-pistols and an old
revolver. We collected all the old lead we could find about the place
and made bullets in a couple of bullet-moulds we had found - one for
ounce and one for small bullets, three to the ounce. The fire to melt
the lead was in a shelter we had made behind an outhouse, and here one
day, in spite of all our precautions, we were discovered at work, with
rows and pyramids of shining bullets round us, and our secret was out.
We were laughed at as a set of young fools for our pains. "Never
mind," said my brother. "Let them mock now; by and by when it comes to
choosing between having our throats cut and defending ourselves, they
will probably be glad the bullets were made."
But though they laughed, our work was not interfered with, and some
hundreds of bullets were turned out and made quite a pretty show.
Meanwhile the besiegers were not idle: they had in their army a
cavalry officer who had had a long experience of frontier warfare and
had always been successful in his fights with the pampas Indians; and
this man, with a picked force composed of veteran fighters, was
dispatched against the barbarians. They had already crossed the Salado
river and were within two or three easy marches of us, when the small
disciplined force met and gave them battle and utterly routed them.
Indians and gauchos were sent flying south like thistle-down before
the wind; but all being well-mounted, not many were killed.
So ended that danger, and I think we boys were all a little
disappointed that no use had been made of our bright beautiful
bullets. I am sure my brother was; but soon after that he left home
for a distant country, and our shooting and other adventures together
were ended for ever.
CHAPTER XXII
BOYHOOD'S END
The book - The Saledero, or killing-grounds, and their smell - Walls
built of bullocks' skulls - A pestilential city - River water and Aljibe
water - Days of lassitude - Novel scenes - Home again - Typhus - My first
day out - Birthday reflections - What I asked of life - A boy's mind - A
brother's resolution - End of our thousand and one nights - A reading
spell - My boyhood ends in disaster.
This book has already run to a greater length than was intended;
nevertheless there must be yet another chapter or two to bring it to a
proper ending, which I can only find by skipping over three years of
my life, and so getting at once to the age of fifteen. For that was a
time of great events and serious changes, bodily and mental, which
practically brought the happy time of my boyhood to an end.
On looking back over the book, I find that on three or four occasions
I have placed some incident in the wrong chapter or group, thus making
it take place a year or so too soon or too late. These small errors of
memory are, however, not worth altering now: so long as the scene or
event is rightly remembered and pictured it doesn't matter much
whether I was six or seven, or eight years old at the time. I find,
too, that I have omitted many things which perhaps deserved a place in
the book - scenes and events which are vividly remembered, but which
unfortunately did not come up at the right moment, and so were left
out.
Of these scenes unconsciously omitted, I will now give one which
should have appeared in the chapter describing my first visit to
Buenos Ayres city: placed here it will serve very well as an
introduction to this last chapter.
In those days, and indeed down to the seventies of last century, the
south side of the capital was the site of the famous Saladero, or
killing-grounds, where the fat cattle, horses and sheep brought in
from all over the country were slaughtered every day, some to supply
the town with beef and mutton and to make _charque,_ or sun-dried
beef, for exportation to Brazil, where it was used to feed the slaves,
but the greater number of the animals, including all the horses, were
killed solely for their hides and tallow. The grounds covered a space
of three or four square miles, where there were cattle enclosures made
of upright posts placed close together, and some low buildings
scattered about To this spot were driven endless flocks of sheep, half
or wholly wild horses and dangerous-looking, long-horned cattle in
herds of a hundred or so to a thousand, each moving in its cloud of
dust, with noise of bellowings and bleatings and furious shouting of
the drovers as they galloped up and down, urging the doomed animals
on. When the beasts arrived in too great numbers to be dealt with in
the buildings, you could see hundreds of cattle being killed in the
open all over the grounds in the old barbarous way the gauchos use,
every animal being first lassoed, then hamstrung, then its throat cut
- a hideous and horrible spectacle, with a suitable accompaniment of
sounds in the wild shouts of the slaughterers and the awful bellowings
of the tortured beasts.
