A thick dust rose from the corral and hung above their heads. Sometimes the horses stood all huddled up, gazing with wide distended eyes and nostrils towards a group of men that lounged about the gate. At other times that panic fear that seizes upon horses when they are crushed together in large numbers, set them a-galloping. Through the dust-cloud their footfalls sounded muffled, and they themselves appeared like phantoms in a mist. When they had circled round a little they stopped, and those outside the throng, craning their heads down nearly to the ground, snorted, and then ran back, arching their necks and carrying their tails like flags. Outside the great corral was set Parodi’s camp, below some China trees, and formed of corrugated iron and hides, stuck on short uprights, so that the hides and iron almost came down upon the ground, in gipsy fashion. Upon the branches of the trees were hung saddles, bridles, halters, hobbles, lazos, and boleadoras, and underneath were spread out saddle-cloths to dry. Pieces of meat swung from the low gables of the hut, and under the low eaves was placed a “catre,” the canvas scissor-bedstead of Spain and of her colonies in the New World. Upon the catre was a heap of ponchos, airing in the sun, their bright and startling colours looking almost dingy in the fierce light of a March afternoon in Uruguay. Close to the camp stood several bullock-carts, their poles supported on a crutch, and their reed-covered tilts giving them an air of huts on wheels. Men sat about on bullocks’ skulls, around a smouldering fire, whilst the “maté” circulated round from man to man, after the fashion of a loving-cup. Parodi, the stiff-jointed son of Italian parents, a gaucho as to clothes and speech, but still half-European in his lack of comprehension of the ways of a wild horse. Arena, the capataz from Entre-Rios, thin, slight, and nervous, a man who had, as he said, in his youth known how to read and even guide the pen; but now “things of this world had turned him quite unlettered, and made him more familiar with the lazo and the spurs.” The mulatto Pablo Suarez, active and cat-like, a great race-rider and horse-tamer, short and deep-chested, with eyes like those of a black cat, and toes, prehensile as a monkey’s, that clutched the stirrup when a wild colt began to buck, so that it could not touch its flanks. They and Miguel Paralelo, tall, dark, and handsome, the owner of some property, but drawn by the excitement of a cowboy’s life to work for wages, so that he could enjoy the risk of venturing his neck each day on a “baguál,” {187} with other peons as El Correntino and Venancio Baez, were grouped around the fire. With them were seated Martin el Madrileño, a Spanish horse-coper, who had experienced the charm of gaucho life, together with Silvestre Ayres, a Brazilian, slight and olive-coloured, well-educated, but better known as a dead pistol-shot than as man of books. They waited for their