With an example like this to follow, it was not difficult to gain the independence of Texas; and whenever Sam Houston rode before his men, crying, “Remember the Alamo!” the battle was already half won. It was not a cry wholly of revenge, I like to think. It was rather the holding up of the cross to the crusaders, and crying, “By this sign we conquer.” It was a watchword to remind men of those who had suffered and died that their cause might live. And so, when we leave Texas, we forget the little things that may have tried our patience and understanding there, we forgive the desolation of the South-west, its cactus and dying cattle, we forget the dinners in the middle of the day and the people’s passing taste in literature, and we remember the Alamo. II OUR TROOPS ON THE BORDER II OUR TROOPS ON THE BORDER A ROLLING, jerky train made up of several freight and one passenger car, the latter equally divided, “For Whites” and “For Negroes”--which in the south-west of Texas reads “Mexicans”--dropped my baggage at Pena station, and rolled off across the prairie, rocking from side to side like a line of canal-boats in a rough sea. It seemed like the last departing link of civilization. There was the freight station itself; beyond the track a leaky water-tank, a wooden store surrounded with piles of raw, foul-smelling hides left in exchange for tobacco and meal, a few thatched Mexican huts, and the prairie. That stretched on every side to the horizon, level and desolate, and rising and falling in the heat. Beneath was a red sandy soil covered with cactus and bunches of gray, leafless brush, marked with the white skeletons of cattle, and overhead a sun at white heat, and heavily moving buzzards wheeling in circles or balancing themselves with outstretched wings between the hot sky above and the hot, red soil below.