Then the latter, taking his lasso, whistled to his colt, which came up at the appeal, and, after saddling it, he leaped lightly on its back. He remained motionless for a moment, taking a sorrowful glance at the men sleeping a short distance from him; and then, after breathing a deep sigh, he addressed Leon once again.
"Farewell!" he said to him: "remember that you are an adopted son of the Araucanos, and that if you please one day to come among your brothers to seek a supporter or a defender, you will find one and the other."
"Farewell!" murmured Leon, whose eyes were moist.
Ere long the half-breed's mustang, sharply spurred, leaped at one bound over the bales which formed the enclosure of the camp, and darted across the plain with the rapidity of an arrow.
After Diego's departure, Leon remained for a long time leaning on the baggage which he had before him; the last words of his departing friend rang in his ear like the sound of a knell; a deep sorrow, a deadly discouragement had seized upon him, and a state of undefinable morbidness preyed on his whole being.
A friendship like that which united him to the Vaquero is not broken so suddenly without the heart suffering from it, and in spite of the exceptional circumstances which had caused the separation of the two men, Leon could not refrain from a species of remorse.
Turning over in his mind the different phases of his past existence and those of the four last years of his life, spent in the midst of llanos and Pampas, he asked himself whether he had not consciously exchanged the quietude of an unclouded present for the painful agitation of a future big with tempests.
With his eye fixed on the dark and bold outline of Diego, which was vaguely designed on the horizon, and was gradually disappearing in space, twenty times he was on the point of dashing forward and begging him to return, while swearing to give up the ardent passion which mastered him; but an invincible force nailed him to the ground, his choking voice died away on his lips, and his courage failed him. Ere long an impenetrable mist spread between the eyes of the young man and his friend, who entirely disappeared.
Then Leon began cursing the fatal love which had come to torture his heart, and the hours of the night passed away unnoticed by him, so greatly were his thoughts concentrated in his soul.