ed a soldier's life for a
brief period in his adopted land, receiving a wound in one of the many
hostilities between the whites and reds in the unsettled districts.

In Buenos Aires, he again worked as a woodcarver. The city was beginning
to expand, breaking its shell as a large village. Desnoyers spent many
years ornamenting salons and facades. It was a laborious existence,
sedentary and remunerative. But one day he became tired of this slow
saving which could only bring him a mediocre fortune after a long time.
He had gone to the new world to become rich like so many others. And
at twenty-seven, he started forth again, a full-fledged adventurer,
avoiding the cities, wishing to snatch money from untapped, natural
sources. He worked farms in the forests of the North, but the locusts
obliterated his crops in a few hours. He was a cattle-driver, with the
aid of only two peons, driving a herd of oxen and mules over the snowy
solitudes of the Andes to Bolivia and Chile. In this life, making
journeys of many months' duration, across interminable plains, he lost
exact account of time and space. Just as he thought himself on the verge
of winning a fortune, he lost it all by an unfortunate speculation.
And in a moment of failure and despair, being now thirty years old, he
became an employee of Julio Madariaga.

He knew of this rustic millionaire through his purchases of flocks--a
Spaniard who had come to the country when very young, adapting himself
very easily to its customs, and living like a cowboy after he had
acquired enormous properties. The country folk, wishing to put a title
of respect before his name, called him Don Madariaga.

"Comrade," he said to Desnoyers one day when he happened to be in a good
humor--a very rare thing for him--"you must have passed through many ups
and downs. Your lack of silver may be smelled a long ways off. Why lead
such a dog's life? Trust in me, Frenchy, and remain here! I am growing
old, and I need a man."

After the Frenchman had arranged to stay with Madariaga, every landed
proprietor living within fifteen or twenty leagues of the ranch, stopped
the new employee on the road to prophesy all sorts of misfortune.

"You will not stay long. Nobody can get along with Don Madariaga. We
have lost count of his overseers. He is a man who must be killed or
deserted. Soon you will go, too!"

Desnoyers did not doubt but that there was some truth in all this.
Madariaga was an impossible characte