The gaucho, with his long, sharp _facón_ stuck through his belt, who lighted his _fogón_ out on the open pampa to prepare his _asado con cuero_, his beef roasted in the hide, who killed a steer for his morning beefsteak or slaughtered a lamb for a pair of chops, who rolled up in his saddle-blanket wherever night overtook him, with his daytime leather seat as pillow, has degenerated into the “hired man,” the mere peon, usually from Spain or Italy, who would be dismayed at the thought of a night without shelter or a day without prepared food. Only a scattered remnant of the real cowboys of the pampas are left, just enough to show the present domesticated generation the stuff of which their forerunners were forged; and even these are usually far away in the remotest corners of the country.
Yet the newcomers take on gradually something of the gaucho’s look, a hardiness, an air of abstraction, as if through gazing long at monotonous nothingness they come to concentrate their attention inwardly and become meditative of soul, with that solemn, self-reliant manner of men who never turn the leaves of any book but nature’s. The countrymen of Nevada or Arizona have the same weathered appearance as the groups gathered about the rare stations at which the through train momentarily halts; the saddled horses tied to wooden rails before the more pretentious buildings among the little clusters of houses set out on the unsheltered open prairie might easily be mistaken for Texas mustangs. In these groups one begins to see suggestions of Indian blood, _mestizos_ with the yellowish-brown skin and thick black hair of the aborigines, yet with a stronger hint of European origin.
Ordinarily this region is swirling with dust, but this year the rains had been early and excessive, and the monotonous brown prairie was often flooded, the dismal houses dripping; the wide public roads were knee-deep sloughs along which tramping would indeed have been an experience. Clusters of farm buildings, generally new, stood here and there in groves of trees, planted trees, which in the Argentine are a sign of opulence, a sort of seigneurial luxury, like diamonds or liveried footmen. The trees native to the pampas being rare and scrubby, it is chiefly the imported eucalyptus standing in little clumps, English sparrows noisily gossiping among them, or rising in broken lines from the frequent lakes of mirage or shallow reality. Boisterous hackmen, sprinkled to the ears with mud, attacked in force the descending passengers at every station serving a town of size and bore them away in clumsy bespattered coaches. Huge two-wheeled carts reminiscent of England here and there labored along the bottomless road from station to town under incoming freight or outgoing country produce. Town after town was monotonously alike, the houses built of crude bricks, with an unfinished air suggesting that they were at most mere temporary stopping-places of men ready to pursue fortune elsewhere on a moment’s notice.