Life in Patagonia. 99 
frontier, and was always employed as a scout in 
times of Indian warfare. He was also a celebrated 
horse-thief. His horse-stealing propensities were 
ineradicable, and had to be winked at on account 
of his usefulness; so that he was left in a great 
measure to his own devices. He was, in fact, a fox 
hired to act as watch-dog to the colony in times of 
danger; and though the victims of his numberless 
thefts had always been anxious to wreak personal 
vengeance on him, his vulpine sagacity had so far 
enabled him to escape them all. My interest in him 
arose from the fact that he was the son of a man 
whose name figures in Argentine history. Sosa’s 
father was an illiterate gaucho—a man of the plains 
—possessing faculties so keen that to ordinary 
beings his feats of vision and hearing, and his sense of 
direction on the monotonous pampas, seemed almost 
miraculous. As he also possessed other qualities 
suitable to a leader of men in a semi-savage region, 
he rose in time to the command of the south-western 
frontier, where his numerous victories over the 
Indians gave him so great a prestige that the 
jealousy of the Dictator Rosas—the Nero of South 
America, aS he was called by his enemies—was 
roused, and at his instigation Sosa was removed by 
means of acup of poison. The son, though in all 
other respects a degenerate being, inherited his 
father’s wonderful senses. One instance of his 
keen-sightedness which I heard struck me as very 
curious. In 1861 Sosa had found it prudent to 
disappear for a season from the colony, and in the 
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