"Enter, Señor Don Zeno Cabral; this house and all it contains belongs to you."
We dismounted without asking anything further, and after a young man of eighteen or twenty, half-naked, who had run out at the call of his master or father--I did not get to know which--had taken the bridle of our horses and had led them away, we entered, followed by the dogs who had so noisily announced our arrival, and who, instead of being hostile to us, leaped around us with signs of pleasure.
This habitation, like all those of the gauchos, was a hut of earth intermingled with reeds, covered with straw; constructed, in fact, with all the primitive simplicity of the desert.
A bed formed of four stakes driven into the earth, supporting a hurdle of reed or strip of leather interlaced, on which was placed, like a European mattress, the untanned skin of an ox; some other hides laid on the floor near the wall for the children's beds, some bolas, some lazos, the indispensable arms of the gauchos, some horses' harness hung from stakes of wood pierced in the wall of the rancho, formed the only furniture of the inner room.
As to the first room, its furniture was simpler still, if possible; it was composed of a hurdle of reeds, supported by six stakes, and serving for a sofa, the heads of two oxen in the place of an armchair, a little barrel of water, a brass kettle, some gourds serving for drinking vessels, a wooden bowl, and an iron spit stuck vertically before the fireplace, which was in the very middle of the apartment.
We have described this rancho thus minutely, because all resemble one another in the pampa, and are, so to speak, constructed on the same model.
Only, as this one belonged to a comparatively rich man, apart from the main building, and at about twenty yards' distance, there was another used as a magazine for the hides and the meats that were to be dried, and surrounded by a tolerably extensive hedge about three yards high, forming the corral, behind which the horses were sheltered.
The honours of the rancho were done for us by two ladies, whom the gaucho introduced to us as his wife and daughter.
The latter, about fifteen years of age, was tall, well made, and endowed with a rather uncommon beauty; she was named Eva, as I afterwards learned; her mother, though still young--she was at the most thirty years of age--had now only the fugitive remains of a beauty which had been very remarkable once.