The oxen, without a jerk, lay slowly, steadily, mightily, into the yokes. The wheels began to turn. The whip popped again, like a crack of lightning in the sky, and the strong voice rose, pleading, encouraging, confident, dominating. The oxen were halfway up the bank now. They pulled on out, but nobody was talking to them any longer. No welcome of feast and fatted calf ever overwhelmed a prodigal son like that, initiated by four faithful old oxen, which Tim Cude received from his mother and father on the banks of an insignificant creek in a wilderness of mesquite. All the gray in the world was suddenly wiped out by sunshine, and all the mockingbirds between the San Antonio River and the Rio Grande seemed to be singing at once. The oxen, silent and slow, kept on pulling down the road. [Illustration: James Bowie and the Bowie Knife] [Illustration] Through long centuries of warring, certain weapons of the Old World, like King Arthur’s “Excalibur” and Siegmund’s great sword “Gram,” became the subjects of legends and of songs that have made them immortal. Their solitary counterpart in the New World, before six-shooter and law-abiding habits supplanted its use, was the Bowie knife. The knife’s origin is wrapped in fable as fantastic as that recounting how the dwarf smiths forged for the old Norse gods; its use is memorialized in a cycle of dark and bloody legends yet told all over the Southwest. And certainly the Bowie knife was once as important to the frontiersman as a steady eye. It was the rule to “use a knife and save powder and lead.” The Bowie knife was the best possible knife to use, and knife throwing and thrusting were arts to be excelled in, as well as shooting and wrestling. Indeed, many frontiersmen regarded any other weapon than the knife, for work in close quarters, as “fit only for the weakly.” Bowie himself, it is claimed, could juggle a number of knives in the air at the same time and at twenty paces send one through a small target of thick wood. For dozens of purposes the Bowie knife was “as handy as a shirt pocket.” Its hard bone or horn handle was often used as a kind of pestle to grind coffee beans. The blade, sometimes as heavy as a Mexican machete, served to hack limbs from trees and to cut underbrush, as well as to dress and skin game. Tradition has it that in the battle of San Jacinto the Texans killed more Mexicans with the Bowie knife than with bullets. An Englishman named Hooten, who visited Texas a few years after the battle and straightway wrote a book, said: “I have myself seen skulls of Mexicans brought in from the battleground of San Jacinto that were cleft nearly through the thickest part of the bone behind, evidently at one blow, and with sufficient force to throw out extensive cracks, like those of starred glass.” [Illustration]