gle of Mexico across the Rio Grande much of it remained a
forbidden land. Even to-day it is alien. It is a part of our Southland,
but a South different to any other that we have. Within it there are no
blacks, and yet the whites number but one in twenty. The rest are
swarthy, black-haired men who speak the Spanish tongue and whose
citizenship is mostly a matter of form.

The stockmen, pushing ahead of the nesters and the tillers of the soil,
were the first to invade the lower Rio Grande, and among these "Old Ed"
Austin was a pioneer. Out of the unmapped prairie he had hewed a
foothold, and there, among surroundings as Mexican as Mexico, he had
laid the beginnings of his fortune.

Of "Old Ed's" early life strange stories are told; like the other
cattle barons, he was hungry for land and took it where or how he
could. There are tales of fertile sections bought for ten cents an
acre, tales of Mexican ranchers dispossessed by mortgage, by monte, or
by any means that came to hand; stories even of some, more stubborn
than the rest, who refused to feed the Austin greed for land, and who
remained on their farms to feed the buzzards instead. Those were crude
old days; the pioneers who pushed their herds into the far pastures
were lawless fellows, ruthless, acquisitive, mastered by the
empire-builder's urge for acres and still more acres. They were the
Reclaimers, the men who seized and held, and then seized more,
concerning themselves little or not at all with the moral law as
applicable to both Mexican and white, and leaving it to the second
generation to justify their acts, if ever justification were required.

As other ranches grew under the hands of such unregenerate owners, so
also under "Old Ed" Austin's management did Las Palmas increase and
prosper. The estate took its name from a natural grove of palms in
which the house was built; it comprised an expanse of rich river-land
backed by miles of range where "Box A" cattle lived and bred. In his
later years the old man sold much land, and some he leased; but when he
handed Las Palmas to his son, "Young Ed," as a wedding gift, the ranch
still remained a property to be proud of, and one that was known far
and wide for its size and richness. Leaving his boy to work out of it a
fortune for himself and his bride, the father retired to San Antonio,
whither the friends and cronies of his early days were drifting. There
he settled down and proceeded to finish his allotted span ex