Читать книгу The Temptress (La tierra de todos) онлайн

25 страница из 108

“On the other hand these millions may not come for many years! They may not arrive until I am at death’s door, and then my sister’s children, here in Spain, will have a good time with the money I’ve worked and sweated for in America....”

But Elena wanted to hear about his life in the Patagonian wilds, that immense plain swept in winter by freezing hurricanes that raise towering columns of dust, and whose sole inhabitants are bands of ostriches, and straying pumas, that sometimes, under stress of hunger, risk attacking a solitary explorer.

Human population had in earlier times been represented there by scanty bands of Indians who scratched a bare living out of the river banks, and by fugitives from Chile and the Argentine, driven through these desolate regions by fear, either of the victims of their crimes, or of the law. Gradually the small forts put up by the government for the troops sent from Buenos Aires to take possession of the Patagonian desert, were slowly converted into little villages, scattered about at distances of hundreds of kilometres through these wild and arid lands.