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.
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