The commandant of Louisiana, though busied with his growing colony, kept yet a watchful eye upon the grasping Spaniards, who claimed the country eastward nearly to the Mississippi. But France claimed westward as far as the bay of San Bernard, by virtue of La Salle’s discovery. Bienville determined to make good the claim of France. In August, 1721, he fitted out a small vessel, the _Subtile_, told off a detachment of tried soldiers, and placed Bernard de la Harpe, an experienced captain, in command. The expedition set out at once to recover La Salle’s old fort. Belleisle, on account of his knowledge of the country and the Indian language, was sent along as guide. The surprise and the rage of the Indians when they saw the hated flag waving again above the fort may be imagined. They threw themselves with such fury against the newcomers that La Harpe, seeing his small garrison in danger of massacre, withdrew quietly, and returned in October to New Orleans. Fort St. Louis was left at last to a solitude never again to be broken. Vines grew over the crumbling walls and sprawled across the floors where human feet had passed; lizards basked in crevices of the blockhouse; and wild creatures from the wood took up their abode in the chapel. Day by day and year by year decay and change went on, until there came a time when nothing remained to tell of the place where the first settlers of Texas lived, suffered, rejoiced, and perished. II. SAN ANTONIO. (1714-1794.) 1. A BOLD RIDER. In 1714 Juchereau St. Denis rode across Texas, in an oblique line from a trading post in Louisiana to a presidio on the Rio Grande River. This was the same St. Denis who afterward, as already related, rescued his comrade-in-arms Belleisle from captivity. He had secret orders from Cadillac, the governor of Louisiana, and his busy brain was teeming with carefully laid plans of his own. His escort consisted of twelve white men and two or three Indians. He took his bearings as he went, carefully marking the way from river to river, from prairie to forest, from Indian village to buffalo range; thus sketching out that long thoroughfare which afterwards became famous as the “Old San Antonio Road.” Much of the way lay through the lands of unfriendly Indians; but St. Denis rode as jauntily as if the men at his back were a thousand instead of a dozen. And when one day he drew rein on the brow of a certain hill, and gazed down into the lovely cup-like valley where a few huts marked the beginnings of San Antonio, he might, for all signs of fatigue upon his handsome young face, have just quitted the governor’s residence.