In a few days we had collected sixty or seventy, and to make all complete, a man arrived, saying that specially on our account, thirteen wild horses, or horses that had run wild, had been enclosed. He offered them on special terms, and we, saddling at once, rode twelve or thirteen leagues to see them; and after crossing a river, wading through a swamp, and winding in and out through a thick wood for several miles, we reached his house. There, in a strong corral, the horses were, wild-eyed and furious, tails sweeping to the ground, manes to their knees, sweating with fear, and trembling if any one came near. One was a piebald dun, about eight years of age, curly all over like a poodle; one Pampa, that is, black with a head as if it had been painted white to the ears; behind them, coal-black down to his feet, which, curiously enough, were all four white. A third, Overo Azulejo, slate-coloured and white; he was of special interest, for he had twisted in his mane a large iron spur, and underneath a lump as large as an apple, where the spur had bumped upon his neck for years during his gallop through the woods and plains. Each horse had some peculiarity, most had been tame at one time, and were therefore more to be dreaded than if they had been never mounted in their lives.
As it was late when we arrived we tied our horses up and found a ball in progress at the house. Braulio Islas was the owner’s name, a man of some position in the land, young and unmarried, and having passed some years of his life in Monte Video, where, as is usual, he had become a doctor either of law or medicine; but the life had not allured him, and he had drifted back to the country, where he lived, half as a Gaucho, half as a “Dotorcito,” riding a wild horse as he were part of him, and yet having a few old books, quoting dog Latin, and in the interim studying international law, after the fashion of the semi-educated in the River Plate. Fastening our horses to long twisted green-hide ropes, we passed into the house. “Carne con cuero” (meat cooked with the hide) was roasting near the front-door on a great fire of bones. Around it men sat drinking maté, smoking and talking, whilst tame ostriches peered into the fire and snapped up anything within their reach; dogs without hair, looking like pigs, ran to and fro, horses were tied to every post, fire-flies darted about the trees; and, above all, the notes, sung in a high falsetto voice of a most lamentable Paraguayan “triste,” quavered in the night air and set the dogs a-barking, when all the company at stated intervals took up the refrain, and chanted hoarsely or shrilly of the hardships passed by Lopez in his great camp at Pirayú.