land whose language he was beginning to pick up made him think only
of himself. The turbulent and adventurous life of these new nations
compelled him to most absurd expedients and varied occupations. Yet he
felt himself strong with an audacity and self-reliance which he never
had in the old world. "I am equal to everything," he said, "if they
only give me time to prove it!" Although he had fled from his country
in order not to take up arms, he even led 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