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  They were moving as water flows, when Dupont first saw the horrible armies. Sometimes the tide stretched suddenly far into the fields, blotting out the green as it went. Sometimes it put out a curling arm toward the big vegetable gardens near the main house, and then by scores the peons were called to stop the rush.

  But it was not a rush. It was a slow, jumbled progress, tumbling against one another, crawling over the backs of the fallen, clumsy, awkward upon their feet at the first mosquito stages of active hopping, unable to climb up a smooth surface, unable even to clamber to the tops of riding boots. It was the uncountable billions with which they executed their slightest maneuvers that made their coming seem swift. Sometimes The Crisco Kid dreamed of the world depopulated by this grim pest. For though the march might be a little delayed here and there, it could not be stopped.

  As for saving the fields, that could not be really attempted. The battle front was too far-flung, the hosts were too dense. The real struggle was only to postpone the destruction of the gardens. When the thin, disgusting flood of life moved toward the vegetable fields, smooth-faced barriers were erected before the army front. There was no question of a diversion to either side from before such an obstacle. The stupid creatures merely knew, by the gnawing in their empty bellies, that somewhere straight ahead there was or might be green food. Therefore the dense battalions packed closer and closer before the small wall, then swarmed upon each other’s backs until the wriggling life was sheeted thick in innumerable billions. When that time came, the massacre was prepared.

  Quantities of the dry stalks of the linseed, useless for any purpose saving bedding and this, were brought out and placed before the wind, at angles that would converge upon the barriers. Then the straw was ignited and rolled by pitchforks and the wind toward the barriers. In front of these the flames were pooled and the blasts of fire, aided by the wicked power of the sun, made the whole stretch across the front of the walls a furnace. It was not hard to kill these things individually.

  A touch of the fire and they withered, then they turned white and red. But again their power was seen in sheer masses of prodigious numbers. For when the top layers were destroyed and the flames grew less, the hidden myriads beneath, protected by the roasted bodies of their uppermost comrades, wriggled forth to the top—and devoured the dead. Yet persistent burning could destroy even these, and at last the earth reeked with the slain—an odor that The Crisco Kid could never forget.

  They grew larger. They became, on a general average, an inch in length by the time Dupont had been on the ranch for ten days. Then pits of two hundred cubic feet apiece were dug—dozens of such pits—and with ten-foot iron scoops, drawn each by two horsemen, the creeping things were swept helplessly into the graves where they were beaten down solid by a boy armed with a bit of brush. Then earth was heaped over the top and the whole trodden firm. Who could compute how many billions went to the filling of any one of the scores of graves? And yet when the labors were ended, nothing seemed to have been done. A day or two, and the earth had given forth fresh billions to replace the fallen.

  Indeed, as Jeff Slinger said to The Crisco Kid: “We do this here work to save the garden and to keep from bein’ fined by the state for not tryin’ to down the locusts. But it ain’t no good. All we kill makes just a few less that are goin’ to starve to death before they turn into voladoras.”

  Fresh pits were dug. The larger hoppers were driven into them with naphtha machines, spouting fire. Still all was nothing.

  They grew still bigger. They reached the last stage before voladoras. They became inch-and-a-half saltonas, covering the face of the country with horror. To walk was to crunch them to death by the score at every stride. The horses were stained with their juices above the fetlocks. Dupont, venturing out without smooth-topped boots was instantly covered to the hair of his head with the swarming horror. Vaster pits were dug. Runways fenced with corrugated iron were constructed, and into these the stupid, huge-headed saltonas were shunted by the cubic yard. But when the pit was filled and the grave filled hastily in at the top, nothing had been done except to pick a handful of sand from the beach.

  They crawled over the edges of the watering troughs, perhaps to seek the green mosses that grew on the inside, and presently the watering trough was filled solidly to the brim with the mass of drowned locusts. Gulls, eagles, and hawks that appeared at no other times, and a myriad of smaller birds, flocked by thousands through the air, flying sluggishly and low. To them, the world had received the touch of Midas and the very surface of the earth was covered with feebly crawling food. But though they filled their crops with the voracity of which only birds are capable, though they ate and ate again of that disgusting fare, they were merely as fishing birds that take from the surface waters a scattering few of the dense bank of herring. The big threshing machine that was preparing the linseed for the market began to turn out an oily stream of seeds and pulpy bodies beaten in together.

  And there were smaller enemies living upon the flanks of this host. There were other insects. The warlike praying mantis came and ate them alive by the thousands. Parasites destroyed more than all other agencies of man and nature put together. But still nothing availed. They still pressed on. Their bellies were emptied. They must be filled, and whenever there was a green thing, they must go.

  They clambered up the poles of the clotheslines and ate the clothes to rags. They mowed down stout, well-matured fields of alfalfa level with the surface of the soil. A thousand tons of alfalfa disappeared from the face of a five-hundred-acre field. But what was a thousand tons of fodder to these creatures? Each could digest only a trifling bit of every trifling plant. But mouthfuls by the thousands of billions will eat up the earth, in time. Saltonas that began to change their skin, and were helpless in that process, were furiously attacked and devoured by their brothers. They swarmed up through the trees. They ate the leaves; they ate the bark; they ate the wood itself, down to the solid and dry old heart of the trunk.

  Then, by sudden myriads, the locusts of the last stage began to appear, hung for a few days drying their new wings, and then flew off to pick up the crumbs of the feast. There was little left for them—twigs, dead saltonas—a few billions of these only, and, of course, the vegetable garden. They could not be kept from this by any defense that the peons could devise.

  Still, voracious feeders though they were, the sweet William and the foxglove, watermelons and pumpkins, cucumbers, onions, and best of all the beautiful paraiso trees were never damaged by the locust swarms. A field of maize well-cultivated, twelve feet high, a wall of green a thousand feet across, was so devastated that Dupont could look through it from side to side, with only enough stalks standing to give an impression of solitary skeletons.

  In February, when the camp was bare and brown, the locusts drifted away to the north, glimmering fogs of life against the sun. And, at the same time, El Tigre showed his face.

  Chapter Twelve

  The position of Charles Dupont at the camp had been something of an anomaly. He might be considered in a way one of the hired men on the ranch, for he received regular pay, and he insisted upon being out in the open and working with the others. If a horse were to be broken, he volunteered for the labor, among the other young fellows on the estancia who were the regular domadores—that is to say, tamers. What a contrast between them and the cowpunchers and waddies among whom The Crisco Kid had learned the arts of the saddle.

  Their skin was smoked with the stain of Indian or Negro blood, or both; the whites of their black eyes were yellowed that significant trifle that tells of mixed blood, and their faces were full of tigerish ferocity. Not that their manners lived up to their appearance in this respect, for they seemed to be cheerful and merry enough, but Dupont felt no desire to treat them familiarly. They had high cheek bones, smallish eyes that were very bright and were apt to settle ominously upon a stranger and stay fixed to him for a long time, wide mouths, and across
the upper lip a long streak of black mustache, not worn long but allowed to grow in a very broad semicircle whose ends were well beneath the corners of the lips. These fellows wore linen drawers secured at the waist with broad leather belts called tiradores, ornamented with silver medals and coins. With short jackets and caps they were equipped for a life of great activity and ardor. And indeed they needed such equipment, for it seemed to The Crisco Kid that in their breaking they spent more time upon the ground than in the saddle.

  The Argentine saddle he was inclined to blame for this. It is a fearful and wonderful contraption that, to be understood, must be described in detail—or layer by layer. There were first of all some soft clothes next to the skin of the horse, or these clothes might be replaced with supple, well-worn skin of almost the same texture and softness as cloth. Next, upon either side of the back, came a bolster or basto made of reeds covered and stiffened with leather. The bolsters are of course connected over the back, and beneath the belly they are fastened by a cinch. Next come several skins topped by a larger, soft, and woolly sheepskin, and, since this would make too hot and dirty a seat, the actual pad upon which the rider sits is a smooth skin. These upper layers of skins above the bolsters are secured with a second cinch.

  The stirrups, to The Crisco Kid, seemed strangest of all. For they were simply wooden disks with holes punched through for the toe of the rider’s boot. But no doubt they answered excellently well. Such a saddle as this could not be thrown on as a waddie throws his in the West of the States. It has to be built up like a house, and a faulty construction may make the whole mass twist awry. Yet, much as Dupont preferred his own saddle, when he offered it to the domadores they were frightened and plainly ill at ease in it. The smooth, slippery leather of the seat was not to their liking. They were at a loss with the narrowness of this saddle, compared with the wide bastos of their own mound of skins, and they quickly dismounted and went back to their native ways. Nevertheless, though they had been raised with this saddle and though they understood many of the tricks of keeping in place on the back of a horse, the great width of their saddles kept them from acquiring that exquisite sense of balance that, after all, is the main essential in horsemanship. Across what would have been the pommel in a waddie’s saddle, the lazo or the antique boleadoras was tied, and this gave a wadding against which the knees could press up and so help to secure the rider in his place.

  Among such riders the exhibitions of The Crisco Kid were like light in the midst of darkness. He rode thirty unbroken horses and secured a single fall during that time, which was a record nearer to perfection than the gauchos dreamed of.

  He worked, too, in the futile war against the locusts. And he rode through the pastures and watched new ways of handling cattle. As to the Argentine fashion of doing these things, Jeff Slinger was remarkably eloquent.

  If they rode across the flat of the country with always that narrow circle of horizon drawn in closely around them, no hill, hardly any tall trees to break it, the majordomo of the estancia on sighting a group of the Durhams that composed the entire stock of cattle on the ranch would break forth: “D’you know why them shorthorns are so doggone’ popular down here, Crisco?”

  “Why, Jeff?” The Crisco Kid would ask with a grin, hoping for a new variation on a theme that he had heard developed before.

  “Because a real, upstandin’, self-respectin’ Hereford would be ashamed to live as doggone’ easy as these here cows live in the Argentine. They ain’t no rustlin’ for them to do. All they got to do is to waller out and chew their stummicks full. What would a Hereford do in this man’s country? They’d get bored and die. That’s all, Crisco.”

  He said on another occasion: “This here is a land of milk cows, old son.”

  So The Crisco Kid, learning as he went, with the avidity of a true Westerner, fell in with the ways and the knowledge of the Argentine. He liked it well enough, partly for its newness of land and grasses and men and manners, but mostly on account of that limitless sweep of the plains. During the day it was always the close-drawn circle of the horizon, but at dawn and sunset and in the night the horizon stepped back—infinite miles, so it seemed. Mountain dwellers may come to love the heights and the depths, and sea rovers have a passion for the sea, but the love of the plains is a fever that, when once it has entered the blood of a man, makes it impossible for him to draw free breath in any other surroundings. So, all the day, The Crisco Kid waited for that sense of immensity that came with the drawing down of the evening.

  Working roughly as he did through the sunshine hours, at night he found himself accepted in the inner circle of the family of the estanciero. That is to say, he had a spacious room in a wing of the great estancia that, built of adobe bricks, wandered aimlessly around huge patios and big gardens, a house of mystery, of old memories, of many surprises. And the meals of Dupont he took at the same table with the manager, Pedro LeBon, a keen-faced, silent man whose name reflected his mixed French and Spanish blood. At the same table were Jeff Slinger, Carreño, and Valdivia himself. The last had lost half of his good cheer since his arrival at the ranch.

  At first The Crisco Kid thought that this abstraction might be most seasonably attributed to the devastations among the crops of the great camp where the locusts were making havoc, but the locusts passed away, and still his eye remained dark. He rarely left the big house, unless it was to look to the breaking of some of the horses, or to examine the fine point of a new colt. On the whole, he was confined day and night to his own suite of rooms, reading, or playing on a great grand piano, for he was an excellent musician. But it seemed to Dupont the loneliest life of which he had ever heard.

  Once he asked Carreño: “Señor Valdivia sick, Carreño?”

  “No, no,” Carreño said, starting and staring at the other as though he had been asked if the world were about to come to an end.

  “He seems very down-hearted,” suggested Dupont.

  “He is, perhaps, not happy,” Carreño admitted cautiously.

  “What’s wrong, then? Bad news of some sort?”

  Carreño shrugged the question away and hurried off. But he watched Dupont with a thoughtful eye for some days, and finally, when they chanced to meet in a corridor, he said suddenly to him: “You asked me a question the other day, señor …”

  “I remember.”

  “Let it be a secret never to be repeated … it is El Tigre, amigo mío.”

  And this remark was carried away in the mind of Dupont for further reflection. He had fully made up his mind. Eventually he was determined that he would go upon the trail of El Tigre and do his best to accomplish a double mission—destroy the monster and bring his lovely daughter to poor Valdivia. But in the meantime he must learn something of the manners and the customs of this strange land. Otherwise, he would begin his search as a man whose eyes have been blindfolded.

  Therefore he would not confide his purpose to Valdivia. Before he had a chance, the lightning struck.

  They were riding across a huge field whose fence could not be sighted before, behind, or on either side. That single field was enough in itself to have composed an entire ranch in a country where estates went in units of a reasonable size. Of the domain of Valdivia it was a mere corner. In the group went Jeff Slinger and the two young fellows who were among the six score peons who worked for daily pay on the estate. It was one of the latter who first sighted the solitary form of a horseman cutting up from the horizon and riding across their way.

  As the stranger drew nearer, they could make out a blood-bay horse, a magnificent animal as the expert eye of Dupont could be sure, even in the distance, by its manner of going. It swung over the ground with the stride of a thoroughbred. This horse presently came near enough for a closer examination, and they could see that the man who mounted it was a slight-built youth of not more than fifteen years, perhaps, riding with much grace and ease.

  This youngster turned his head and
surveyed them with great indifference. To their shouted greetings he returned not a sign and presently disappeared beyond a group of willows. He was no sooner out of sight than Jeff Slinger and Dupont found themselves looking angrily at one another.

  “If I was back in Arizona,” Jeff said, “that’d call for a little disciplinin’ … a young skunk showin’ no more manners than to pass by some growed-up folks and say no more’n that. Might as well tell us we was beneath his noticin’.”

  “Suppose,” said The Crisco Kid, with a faint smile that sundry unfortunate people had seen before, “that we introduce a lesson in manners even down here?”

  His companion regarded him with new interest. “Humph!” he said, and turned to the gauchos.

  “Lads,” he said, “can you catch that young brat?”

  They showed their white teeth to him. “A peso to the fellow who catches him,” said the majordomo.

  And the whole quartet started off at a round pace. They turned the flank of the willows, and there was the stranger floating away across the plains. Perhaps the wind blew the noise of showering hoofbeats to his ears. At any rate, without turning in the saddle, he suddenly slunk forward to a jockeying position and started his animal away at great speed. The race was on.

  Chapter Thirteen

  It was apparent that the gauchos were not in it for an instant. Though they whipped and cursed and yelled, they could not maintain the gait that was necessary to keep with the speeding bay before them. Even Jeff Slinger’s long-legged half-breed was strung out straight in another moment, but still the color of the bay grew dim and dimmer as it drew away.

  “The young devil has the wind under him,” Slinger snorted. “Let’s see what your horse can do, Crisco.”