“The old women, and the ugly young ones, are instantly butchered; but the young and beautiful are idols by whom even the merciless hand of the savage is arrested. Whether the poor girls can ride or not, they are instantly placed upon horses, and when the hasty plunder of the hut is concluded, they are driven away from its smoking ruins, and from the horrid scene which surrounds it. At a pace which in Europe is unknown, they gallop over the trackless regions before them, feed upon mare’s flesh, sleeping on the ground, until they arrive in the Indian’s territory, when they have instantly to adopt the wild life of their captors.” Scenes of such horrors, where the mangled remains of the victims were still lying around the black ruins of their huts, which Captain Head passed, are too dreadful to transcribe. But what are the feelings of the Gaucho towards these terrible enemies? Captain Head asked a Gaucho what they did with their Indian prisoners when they took any.—“To people accustomed to the cold passions of England, it would be impossible to describe the savage, inveterate, furious hatred which exists between the Gauchos and the Indians. The latter invade the country for the ecstatic pleasure of murdering the Christians, and in the contests which take place between them, mercy is unknown. Before I was quite aware of those feelings, I was galloping with a very fine-looking Gaucho who had been fighting with the Indians, and after listening to his report of the killed and wounded, I happened, very simply, to ask him how many prisoners they had taken. The man replied with a look which I shall never forget—he clenched his teeth, opened his lips, and then sawing his fingers across his bare throat for a quarter of a minute, bending towards me, with his spurs sticking into his horse’s sides, he said, in a sort of low, choking voice, ‘Se matan todas,’—we kill them all!”