weapon. When the pions fight among
themselves, it is over cards. They are all gamblers,
ready to stake their last horse, the poncho from
their backs, their very knife upon the issue of
the game. Otherwise they are quiet. I have
lived among them for fifteen years, and never
seen blood drawn in earnest. Once or twice
only when they have been sparring, a slight
accidental wound has been inflicted.

Before strangers the pion is taciturn; he
listens well and looks for his advantage. I
never felt that a pion was getting into my
confidence, without feeling also that he was getting
into my pocket. If he gave me a horse, I
presently must lend him, as a favour, something of
twice the value that would never be returned,
or in some other way be made to find the gift-
horse, of all cattle the most costly. The pion
does not resent injury, though, he feels personal
insult more keenly than loss of property. He
is not grateful for gifts. I have found that the
best way to manage him—and that is true, not
only of business with the pion is strict fulfilment
of contract, giving him his just due,
requiring of him just return of work and allowing
nothing to go by favour, either of presents on
the one side, or of an hour's extra work not
paid for according to its just value, on the other.
Make him a present of eleven out of your stock
of a dozen shirts, and he thinks you a niggard
for not having given him the twelfth. Be just
to the uttermost, and wholly abstain from acts
of arbitrary generosity, and he discovers no
grounds for dissatisfaction.

Marcus Aquirre was a gaucho of the old
school, who, when I had his services, was
advanced in years. His early manhood had been
spent in bloodshed and plunder, he had often
been convicted: more than once left for execution.
Knowing the haunts of his comrades of
the thieves, he had been employed by the authorities
as a guide to the thief-takers; but as the
thief-takers themselves generally, and sometimes
also their officer in charge, had worked at the
same trade, they had a tenderness for those who
had not yet retired from business, and seldom
found the men they were supposed to look for.
I often had occasion to employ Marcus as a
pion by the day, working on his own horses, and
found him not only a first-rate horseman, who
threw a good lasso and thoroughly understood his
business, but a man whom I could safely trust.

Of all the duties upon an estancia, that of
making troops of the wild bulls and oxen is
most dangerous for man and horse. When one
of them is brought foaming with rage into the
señuelo, he has to be thrown down in order to
remove the lasso, and he must then suffer tipping
of his horns, and other worse operations.
Many of the bulls make a dangerous rush to
escape, and I have often thought that they had
wit enough to attempt the breach of the line of
pions, where the worst jockey was stationed.
Marcus has often warned me to "move on,"
when I was exposed, as the director of such a
work especially is, to a dangerous rush, against
which the horse is often more on the alert than
his rider, and defends himself by springing aside
so suddenly, that the rider is liable to be thrown
off and fall under the feet of the bull. The best
horseman in England would find his skill tried to
the utmost by this work. When the animal
caught in the lasso darts off in any direction,
the pion must follow so as to keep a slack cord,
and every movement of the bull must be
answered by a movement of the horse, the rider
always wheeling round so as to keep the off side
towards him, or else horse and rider would
become themselves entangled in the lasso. The
pions, accustomed from boyhood to these sudden
movements, seldom lose their seats, unless they
are thrown by the stumbling of the horse in
burrows, or other breaks of the soil.

Marcus Aquirre was among my helpers once
in such an expedition, and slept with me in the
vigilante; he on his saddle gear, I on a pile
of dry hides. Before cockcrow in the morning he
rose, lighted the fire, drew a bullock head
towards it, and sitting down upon that, remained
motionless for a whole hour with his head
through the loophole of his poncho and elbow on
each knee, and his chin resting on his crossed
wrists. Sometimes he looked round to see that
he was not alone, and then again fixed his eyes
upon the fire, so that I could watch quietly from
my corner the intense expression and the twitchings
of his face. At last I announced myself to
be awake with a "Good morning, Marcus, why
so solemn? Rouse up, and put on the kettle."

"Ah, good luck to you, patron, you always
are an early man." He got the breakfast ready,
and said while we ate it, that he had been
looking back to the years gone by, and to the ill-
deeds he had done in them. "But they are
gone," he said with a sigh, "and cannot be
undone." On that day, in the course of our chase,
his horse fell, and Marcus received fatal hurt of
which he died. He was the last of the gauchos
known to me. His class is extinct. Wild cattle
no longer abound in the pampas, a more effective
police has been established, and the class to
which Marcus Aquirre belonged is now extinct.

The homes of the pions are not made happy
by any sense of the sacredness of marriage. I
had a woman serving me well as house servant
for seven years, who in that time had five
husbands, all of them still living, and upon good
terms with one another. The wife attends with
unembarrassed friendliness on her discarded
husbands, when she hands round the supply for
cups and plates to them as to the other men,
and none of them, even on the first day of his
dismissal, has sulked with her. The pions are
untaught, none of the women and few only of
the men can read, still fewer write their names.
Marriage gives to the man, at small expense, a
cook and housekeeper to make and mend for
him, and to the woman it gives a protector in
the solitude of the pampas. The marriage bond
holds good till either party wishes it untied.
One summer, for example, I sat by the house-
door talking upon business to my overseer, when
a pion came riding towards us with a woman and
two children. As soon as he had seen them