cards. For gambling
the man had an insatiable thirst; he played once for forty hours without
intermission; it was death to refuse a game with him; no one might cease
playing without his express commands; no one durst win the stakes; and as
a consequence, he accumulated at cards in a few years almost all the
coined money then existing in the province.[2] Not content with this
source of revenue, he became a farmer of the _diezmo_ or tithes,
appropriated to himself the _mostrenco_ or unbranded cattle, by which
means he speedily became proprietor of many thousand head, even
established a monopoly of beef in his own favor,--and woe to the luckless
fool who should dare to infringe upon the terrible barbarian's
prerogative!

[Footnote 2: Thus the Monagas, the late rulers of Venezuela, are accused
of denuding their country of specie in order to accumulate a vast treasure
abroad in expectation of a rainy day.]

What was the state of society, it will undoubtedly be inquired, in which
the defeat of a handful of men could result in such a despotism? We have
already glanced at the people of La Rioja,--at their dreamy, Oriental
character, at their pastoral pursuits. A community of herdsmen, scattered
over an extensive territory, and deprived at one blow of the two great
families to whom they had been accustomed to look up, with infantine
submission, as their God-appointed chiefs,--these were not the men to
stand up, unprompted by a single master-mind, to rid themselves of one
whose oppression was, after all, only a new form of the treatment to
which, for an entire generation, they had been subjected. La Rioja and San
Juan were the only two provinces in which Quiroga's heavy hand was felt
continuously; in the others he ruled rather by influence than in person;
and the Gauchos, as a matter of course, were enthusiastic for a man who
exalted the peasant at the expense of the citizen, whose exactions were
actually burdensome only to the wealthy, and who permitted every license
to his followers, with the single exception of disobedience to himself.

He was not without--it is impossible that he should have lacked--some of
those instinctive and personal attributes with which almost every savage
chieftain who has maintained so extraordinary an ascendency over his
fellows has been endowed. Sarmiento tells us that he was tall, immensely
powerful, a famous _ginete_ or horseman, a more adroit wielder of the
lasso and the _bolas_ than even his