“And how many are you able to sell, my good man?”

“About thirty thousand, sir.”

It was not necessary to hear more.  The supercilious merchant sprang from his desk, and obsequiously offered him a seat.

“You can be no other than Don Madariaga.”

“At the service of God and yourself, sir,” he responded in the manner of a Spanish countryman.

That was the most glorious moment of his existence.

In the outer office of the Directors of the Bank, the clerks offered him a seat until the personage the other side of the door should deign to receive him.  But scarcely was his name announced than that same director ran to admit him, and the employee was stupefied to hear the ranchman say, by way of greeting, “I have come to draw out three hundred thousand dollars.  I have abundant pasturage, and I wish to buy a ranch or two in order to stock them.”

His arbitrary and contradictory character weighed upon the inhabitants of his lands with both cruel and good-natured tyranny.  No vagabond ever passed by the ranch without being rudely assailed by its owner from the outset.

“Don’t tell me any of your hard-luck stories, friend,” he would yell as if he were going to beat him.  “Under the shed is a skinned beast; cut and eat as much as you wish and so help yourself to continue your journey. . . .  But no more of your yarns!”

And he would turn his back upon the tramp, after giving him a few dollars.

One day he became infuriated because a peon was nailing the wire fencing too deliberately on the posts.  Everybody was robbing him!  The following day he spoke of a large sum of money that he would have to pay for having endorsed the note of an acquaintance, completely bankrupt.  “Poor fellow!  His luck is worse than mine!”

Upon finding in the road the skeleton of a recently killed sheep, he was beside himself with indignation.  It was not because of the loss of the meat.  “Hunger knows no law, and God has made meat for mankind to eat.  But they might at least have left the skin!” . . .  And he would rage against such wickedness, always repeating, “Lack of religion and good habits!” The next time, the bandits stripped the flesh off of three cows, leaving the skins in full view, and the ranchman said, smiling, “That is the way I like people, honorable and doing no wrong.”

His vigor as a tireless centaur had helped him powerfully in his task of populating his lands.  He was capricious, despotic and with the same paternal instincts as his compatriots who, centuries before when conquering the new world, had clarified its native blood.  Like the Castilian conquistadors, he had a fancy for copper-colored beauty with oblique eyes and straight hair.  When Desnoyers saw him going off on some sudden pretext, putting his horse at full gallop toward a neighboring ranch, he would say to himself, smilingly, “He is going in search of a new peon who will help work his land fifteen years from now.”