"In Chili, if you have right, you can get justice every time," said a Frenchman owning 100,000 sheep on the border line between Argentine and Chili. "In the Argentine you must have the judge for your friend or you will be beaten, right or wrong."
[Illustration: THE GOVERNOR'S HOME AND A BUSINESS BLOCK IN GALLEGOS, THE CAPITAL OF PATAGONIA.]
As to the Rio Gallegos lands, the traveller finds lava beds and pasture lands alternating, but the pasture has the greater area, and it is simply perfect pasture. The low bottom lands are flooded in September and October when the Andes snow melts, but there is plenty of good upland pasture. Nearly all the land south of it is now taken up by shepherds, while the north side is being rapidly absorbed, the chief obstacle to rapid settlement being the lack of fuel. It is almost a bushless region.
On the whole, the town of Gallegos has a very good cattle country back of it. Along the sea-coast to the south it has some placer gold mines. The layer of black sand carrying gold crops out richer in some places than others, and there are places where the lack of drinking water makes mining impossible, but quite a number of men--perhaps fifty--can be found working the beach for gold between Gallegos and Cape Virgins.
What the traveller sees in the territorial capital now is a score or less of corrugated iron buildings, with half a dozen houses of wood and three of adobe. One of the adobe-walled houses is the territorial prison. Any smart rascal could burrow out in an hour. About one-third of the houses are hotels and stores, the outer appearance of these buildings being like that of a Yankee mining camp. Every store carries a considerable stock of liquors and tobacco, a moderate stock of hardware and cutlery likely to attract ranchmen, a small stock of wool and cotton fabrics, and a few samples of groceries. The stocks were not arranged to make anything like an attractive display, and, because sand storms were likely to come at any time to dust over the interior of every building, nobody thought it worth while to sweep or in any way clean house.
As hotels (every store was a hotel) the places were most unattractive; worse, for instance, than any I saw when _The Sun_ sent me through the wilds of southern Mexico. In Mexico all of a party of travellers, men, women, children, and servants, would be lodged in a single room, with nothing but the tile floor or a bench to sleep on, but it was always a clean floor, while one could have a hammock under a veranda if he chose, and that was about the best kind of bed. Moreover, food was always abundant and good. At some Gallegos hotels one could not be certain of either quantity or quality of the food, while the blankets were neither washed nor aired nor changed.