Hard Case

EL JIMMY--Herbert Childs--Lippincott ($3).

Six thousand miles due south of Manhattan lies Punta Arenas, largest town in Patagonia, southernmost city in the world. Few tourists find their way there. Patagonia is a forbidding land of glacial mountains, dense forests and windswept plain, where women are scarce and the men are hard cases. Not because they wanted to avoid trippers but because the idea ex- cited them, Herbert Childs and his newly-married wife went to Patagonia on their honeymoon. She had been there before, had heard tales of an English settler far in the interior who might be good copy for a book. Getting to Patagonia was exciting in itself. They were the only passengers on the freighter that took them from Los Angeles down around South America, and after riding out a hurricane, through the sinister Straits of Magellan. Once ashore, they had a long, hard trip by truck and horseback to get to the mountain sheep-ranch they were heading for, almost on the border between Argentina and Chile. The man they sought was known variously as "El Jimmy," "El Gringo Malo" or "El Ingles." Native of a Berkshire village who had come to Patagonia after some mild poaching affairs and more serious trouble with a girl, his real name was James Radburne. He characterized himself, with modest firmness, as "a hard case."

Jimmy was glad to see the Childses, delighted at the idea of being put into a book. In spare moments from his sheepherding, he spun them the yarn of his adventures. When Jimmy came to Patagonia, in 1892, it had been an even wilder land. In Tierra del Fuego, where he went first as a herder, the Indians were being hunted and killed like wild animals. Naked Indian women were kept tethered outside the herders' tents until their pregnancy made them a nuisance. There was little law but the gauchos' own. Jimmy liked the life--a man's life.

He started raising sheep, racing horses for himself. And he got on well with the Indians. Then he ran foul of the law. An Indian friend of his was killed, and when Jimmy went to town to set justice on the murderer's track, he himself was inexplicably clapped in jail. After a few weeks in prison he escaped, took refuge with the friendly Indians.

Jimmy had many a brush with the police after that, and some narrow escapes, but they never got him. Meantime he had fallen in love (seriously, this time) with an Indian lass, and she with him. Her stern parent, in view of Jimmy's uncertain social position, frowned on the match, and a blackguard named Montenegro, an even harder case than Jimmy, married the girl. It was a blow to Jimmy but he went his way, dodging the police, smacking other hard cases when they asked for it, gradually adding to his flocks until he was regarded as a man of property. But by then law & order had begun to move into the interior; property claims had to be legally recorded. Outlaw Jimmy could not safely show his face in a town. By being an outlaw he missed the chance of escorting a group of Indians to the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904. He was pushed farther & farther up into the mountains.

But he never forgot Juana, the Indian girl his rival had stolen from him. When Montenegro finally went too far, was arrested and put behind the bars, Jimmy seized his chance and went off with Juana. After she had borne him several children he did what he could to legalize her position by marrying her. And he finally risked an appearance in town, got his claim to his own lands recorded. He became a respectable, retired, sheep-ranching outlaw. By the time the Childses met her, Juana's earlier charms had faded and thickened; she seemed to think that, as far as women were concerned, Jimmy was still a somewhat hard case.

Some of the tales Jimmy told his guests to illustrate his contention that Patagonia was a man's country: a favorite Indian pick-me-up for a hangover was a mixture of raw liver, heart, kidneys and blood of a guanaco (llama-like native antelope). When two men were having a fight, one bit off the other's ear; the earless man got his opponent down, beat him about the face till he swallowed the ear. As indication that not all Patagonian hard cases are yet dead, jailed or retired, Jimmy wrote the Childses after their departure that he was sorry to say that a man Mrs. Childs had danced the tango with had since been shot.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.