Twenty miles from the _pulpería_ he draws rein, dismounts, wipes his bloody knife on the grass, and slices off a collop of _charque_, which he munches composedly for his supper. Very likely this _misfortune_ will make him a _Gaucho malo_. The _Gaucho malo_ is an outlaw, at home only in the desert, intangible as the wind, sanguinary, remorseless, swift. His brethren of the _estancia_ pronounce his name occasionally, but in lowered tones, and with a mixture of terror and respect; he is looked up to by them as a sort of higher being. His home is a movable point upon an area of twenty thousand square miles; his horse, the finest steed that he can find upon the Pampas between Buenos Ayres and the Andes, between the Gran Chaco and Cape Horn; his food, the first beef that he captures with his lasso; his dainties, the tongues of cows which he kills, and abandons, when he has stripped them of his favorite titbit, to the birds of prey. Sometimes he dashes into a village, drinks a gourdful of _aguardiente_ with the admiring guests at the _pulpería_, and spurs away again into obscurity, until at length the increasing number of his _desgracias_ tempts the mounted emissaries of justice to pursue him, in the hope of extra reward. 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.