emissaries of justice to pursue him, in the hope of extra reward.  If suddenly beset by seven or eight of these desert police, the Gaucho malo slashes right and left with his redoubted knife,—­kills one, maims another, wounds them all.  Perhaps he reaches his horse and is off and away amid a shower of harmless balls;—­or he is taken; in which case, all that remains, the day after, of the Gaucho malo, is a lump of soulless clay.

Then there is the guide, or vaqueano.  This man, as one who knows him well informs us, is a grave and reserved Gaucho, who knows by heart the peculiarities of twenty thousand leagues of mountain, wood, and plain!  He is the only map that an Argentinian general takes with him in a campaign; and the vaqueano is never absent from his side.  No plan is formed without his concurrence.  The army’s fate, the success of a battle, the conquest of a province, is entirely dependent upon his integrity and skill; and, strange to say, there is scarcely an instance on record of treachery on the part of a vaqueano.  He meets a pathway which crosses the road upon which he is travelling, and he can tell you the exact distance of the remote watering-place to which it leads; if he meet with a thousand similar pathways in a journey of five hundred miles, it will still be the same.  He can point out the fords of a hundred rivers; he can guide you in safety through a hundred trackless woods.  Stand with him at midnight on the Pampa,—­let the track be lost,—­no moon or stars; the vaqueano quietly dismounts, examines the foliage of the trees, if any are near, and if there are none, plucks from the ground a handful of roots, chews them, smells and tastes the soil, and tells you that so many hours’ travel due north or south will bring you to your destination.  Do not doubt him; he is infallible.

A mere vaqueano was General Rivera of Uruguay,—­but he knew every tree, every hillock, every dell, in a region extending over more than 70,000 square miles!  Without his aid, Brazil would have been powerless in the Banda Oriental; without his aid, the Argentinians would never have triumphed over Brazil.  As a smuggler in 1804, as a custom-house officer a few years later, as a patriot, a freebooter, a Brazilian general, an Argentinian commander, as President of Uruguay against Lavalleja, as an outlaw against General Oribe, and finally against Rosas, allied with Oribe, as champion of the Banda Oriental del Uruguay, Rivera had certainly ample opportunities for perfecting himself in that study of which he was the ardent devotee.

Cooper has told us how and by what signs, in years that have forever faded, the Huron tracked his flying foe through the forests of the North; we read of Cuban bloodhounds, and of their frightful baying on the scent of the wretched maroon; we know how the Bedouin follows his tribe over pathless sands;—­and yet all these are bunglers, in comparison with the Gaucho rastreador!