He does not long, however, remain the companion of peons.  Eighteen hundred and ten has come, bringing with it liberty, and bloodshed, and universal discord.  The sun of May beams down upon a desolated land.  For the mild, although repressive viceregal sway is substituted that of a swarm of military chieftains, who, fighting as patriots against Liniers and his ill-fated troops, as rivals with each other, or as montanero-freebooters against all combined, swept the plains with their harrying lancers from the seacoast to the base of the Cordillera.

In this period of anarchy we catch another glimpse of Juan Facundo.  He has worked his way down to Buenos Ayres, nine hundred miles from home, and enlists in the regiment of Arribenos, raised by his countryman, General Ocampo, to take part in the liberation of Chile.  But even the infinitesimal degree of discipline to which his fellow-soldiers had been reduced was too much for his wild spirit; already he feels that command, and not obedience, is his birthright; there is soon a vacancy in the ranks.

With three companions Quiroga took to the desert.  He was followed and overtaken by an armed detachment, or partida; summoned to surrender; the odds are overpowering.  But this man bids defiance to the world; he is yet, in this very region, to rout well-appointed and disciplined armies with a handful of men; and he engages the partida.  A sanguinary conflict is the result, in which Quiroga, slaying four or five of his assailants, comes off victorious, and pursues his journey in the teeth of other bands which are ordered to arrest him.  He reaches his native plains, and, after a flying visit to his parents, we again lose sight of the Gaucho malo.  Blurred rumors of his actions have, indeed, been preserved; accounts of brutality toward his gray-haired father, of burnings of the dwelling in which he first saw the light, of endless gaming, and plentiful shedding of blood; but we hear nothing positive concerning him until the year 1818.  Somewhere in that year he determines to join the band of freebooters under Ramirez, which was then devastating the eastern provinces.  And here—­O deep designs of Fate!—­the very means intended to check his mad career serve only to accelerate its development.  Dupuis, governor of San Luis, through which province he is passing on his way to join Ramirez, arrests the Gaucho malo, and throws him into the common jail, there to rot or starve as Fortune may direct.

But she had other things in store for him.  A number of Spanish officers, captured by San Martin in Chile, were confined within the same walls.  Goaded to the energy of despair by their sufferings, and convinced that after all they could die no more than once, the Spaniards rose one day, broke open the doors of their prison, and proceeded to that part of the building where the common malefactors, and among them Juan Facundo, were confined.  No sooner