In Buenos Aires, he again worked as a woodcarver.  The city was beginning to expand, breaking its shell as a large village.  Desnoyers spent many years ornamenting salons and facades.  It was a laborious existence, sedentary and remunerative.  But one day he became tired of this slow saving which could only bring him a mediocre fortune after a long time.  He had gone to the new world to become rich like so many others.  And at twenty-seven, he started forth again, a full-fledged adventurer, avoiding the cities, wishing to snatch money from untapped, natural sources.  He worked farms in the forests of the North, but the locusts obliterated his crops in a few hours.  He was a cattle-driver, with the aid of only two peons, driving a herd of oxen and mules over the snowy solitudes of the Andes to Bolivia and Chile.  In this life, making journeys of many months’ duration, across interminable plains, he lost exact account of time and space.  Just as he thought himself on the verge of winning a fortune, he lost it all by an unfortunate speculation.  And in a moment of failure and despair, being now thirty years old, he became an employee of Julio Madariaga.

He knew of this rustic millionaire through his purchases of flocks—­a Spaniard who had come to the country when very young, adapting himself very easily to its customs, and living like a cowboy after he had acquired enormous properties.  The country folk, wishing to put a title of respect before his name, called him Don Madariaga.

“Comrade,” he said to Desnoyers one day when he happened to be in a good humor—­a very rare thing for him—­“you must have passed through many ups and downs.  Your lack of silver may be smelled a long ways off.  Why lead such a dog’s life?  Trust in me, Frenchy, and remain here!  I am growing old, and I need a man.”

After the Frenchman had arranged to stay with Madariaga, every landed proprietor living within fifteen or twenty leagues of the ranch, stopped the new employee on the road to prophesy all sorts of misfortune.

“You will not stay long.  Nobody can get along with Don Madariaga.  We have lost count of his overseers.  He is a man who must be killed or deserted.  Soon you will go, too!”

Desnoyers did not doubt but that there was some truth in all this.  Madariaga was an impossible character, but feeling a certain sympathy with the Frenchman, had tried not to annoy him with his irritability.

“He’s a regular pearl, this Frenchy,” said the plainsman as though trying to excuse himself for his considerate treatment of his latest acquisition.  “I like him because he is very serious. . . .  That is the way I like a man.”

Desnoyers did not know exactly what this much-admired seriousness could be, but he felt a secret pride in seeing him aggressive with everybody else, even his family, whilst he took with him a tone of paternal bluffness.

The family consisted of his wife Misia Petrona (whom he always called the China) and two grown daughters who had gone to school in Buenos Aires, but on returning to the ranch had reverted somewhat to their original rusticity.