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.
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