not of Roman gladiators, or
French gardens with beringed ladies and tame fawns. It is a frieze of
the cowboys taking a stampeding herd up the long trail--drifting and
driving but held together by a rough fellow in top boots and sombrero;
and the rotunda has a frieze of cowboys because that three
million-dollar hotel was built out of "cow" money. Old and new, past and
present, Saxon and Latin, North and South, East and West--that is San
Antonio. You can never forget it for a minute. It is such a shifting
panorama as you could only get from traveling thousands of miles
elsewhere, or comparing a hundred Remington drawings. San Antonio is a
curious combination of Remington and Alma Tadema in real life; and I
don't know anywhere else in the world you can get it. There are three
such huge hotels in San Antonio besides a score of lesser ones, to take
care of the 30,000 tourists who come from the Middle West to winter in
San Antonio; but remember that while 30,000 seems a large number of
tourists for one place, that is only one-tenth the number of Americans
who yearly see Europe.

And never for a moment can you forget that as Cairo is the gateway to
Eastern travel, so San Antonio is on the road to Old Mexico and all the
former Spanish possessions of the South. It was here that Madero's band
of revolutionists lived and laid the plans that overthrew Diaz. Long
ago, before the days of railway, it was here that the long caravans of
mule trains used to come with, silver and gold from the mines of Old
Mexico. It was here the highwaymen and roughs and toughs and scum of the
earth used to lie in wait for the passing bullion; and it was here the
Texas Rangers came with short, quick, sharp shrift for rustlers and
robbers. There is one corner in San Antonio where you can see a Mission
dating back to the early seventeen hundreds, and not a stone's throw
away, one of the most famous gambling joints of the wildest days of the
wild Southwest--the site of the old Silver King, where cowboys and
miners from the South used to come in "to clean out" their earnings of a
year, sometimes to ride horses over faro tables, or pot-shot rows of
champagne. A man had "to smile" when he called his "pardner" pet names
in the Silver King; or there would be crackle of more than champagne
corks. Men would duck for hiding. A body would be dragged out, sand
spread on the floor, and the games went on morning, noon and night. The
Missions are crumbling ruins. So is