This little incident, of so trifling import at the time, was remembered in after years as an early indication of the ferocious and uncontrollable caudillo’s character.  But it was soon eclipsed by the reckless deeds that followed each other in quick succession between his fifteenth and twentieth years.  He speedily became notorious in the little town for his wild moroseness, for his savage ferocity when excited, for his inordinate love of cards.  Gaming, a passion with many, was a necessary of life to him; it was the only pursuit to which he was ever constant; it gave rise to the quarrel in which, while yet a schoolboy, he for the first time spilt blood.

By and by we lose sight of the student of San Juan.  He has absolutely sunk out of sight.  Yet, if we peer into filthy pulperias here and there between San Luis and San Juan, we may catch a glimpse of a shaggy, swarthy savage, gambling, gambling as if for life; and we may also hear of more than one affray in which his dagger has “come home richer than it went.”  A little later, the son of wealthy Don Prudencio has become—­not a common laborer—­but a comrade of common laborers.  He chooses the most toilsome, the most unintellectual, but, at the same time, the most remunerative handicraft,—­that of the tapiador, or builder of mud walls.  At San Juan, in the orchard of the Godoys,—­at Fiambala, in La Rioja, in the city of Mendoza,—­they will show you walls which the hands of General Facundo Quiroga, Comandante de Campana, etc., etc., put together.  Wherever he works, he is noted for the ascendency which he maintains over the other peons.  They are entirely subject to his will; they do nothing without his advice; he is worth, say his employers, a dozen overseers.  Ah, he is yet to rule on a larger scale!

Did these people ever think,—­as they watched the sombre, stubborn Gaucho sweating over a tapia, subjecting a drove of peons to his authority, or, stretched upon a hide, growing ferocious as the luck went against him at cards,—­that here was one of those forces which mould or overturn the world?  Could it ever have occurred to the Godoys of San Juan, to the worthy municipality of Mendoza, that this scowling savage was yet to place his heel upon their prostrate forms, and most thoroughly to exhibit, through weary, sanguinary years, the reality of that tremendous saying,—­ “The State? I am the State!”?

Doubtless no.  Little as the comrades of Maximin imagined that the truculent Goth was yet to wear the blood-stained purple, little as the clients of Robespierre dreamed of the vortex toward which he was being insensibly hurried by the stream of years, did the men, whose names are thrown out from their obscurity by the glare of his misdeeds, conceive that their fortunes, their lives, all things but their souls, were shortly to depend upon the capricious breath of this servant who so quietly pounds away upon their mud inclosures.