Texas! Was ever a land elsewhere so vast and yet so beautiful as this, thought Ernest, as throughout the next day he and the Texan steadily rode onward, threading deeply-grassed prairies, circuiting patches of rich timber, crossing streams and swamps, and seeing scarce a sign of human life, but horses and deer and turkeys in abundance. Where were the Texas settlers?
“Down yonder we’ll find ’em,” he said. “But the country’s not crowded. Every man has plenty room. This is principally Comanche range――and those fellows we don’t want to see!”
After such long travel that Ernest completely lost track of the days, they came to the first real token of civilization: a straight, well-travelled road, with marks not only of horses’ hoofs but of wheels.
“The Royal Road,” explained Mr. Carroll, pausing. “Laid out by the Spanish before the Texas settlers entered. Runs clean across the middle of Texas between Nacogdoches of the east and San Antonio of the west. But we don’t follow it. We strike down by the San Felipe trace, for Gonzales. If we followed the San Antonio road we’d pass too far north.”
Presently he turned off, to the left, upon a much lesser road――another of those Texas trails or “traces.” Evidently this was the San Felipe trace. Now they met a few people, mainly hunters on horseback; and that night they stopped with a settler family at whose ranch-house, a rude log cabin, glassless and floorless, they were made more than welcome to a supper of corn-bread, venison and honey, and to a husk bunk.
The next afternoon Mr. Carroll pointed ahead.
“San Felipe on the Brazos,” he announced. “First American town founded in Texas, headquarters of Steve Austin’s colony, and sort of capital for the whole outfit of us. We’ll stop there to-night, and at Burnam’s on the Colorado to-morrow night, and day after we’ll push on through to Gonzales.”
San Felipe was a straggling little town, with scattered houses of logs and of thick, rough-sawed siding like clapboards, and dusty but wide streets, centering about two public squares or plazas. There was a tavern, run by a settler named Whitesides, and a double log house where lived Stephen Austin himself, the “Father of Texas.” He was away from town, just now, on business. Mr. Carroll thought that at least 1500 people formed the population of the San Felipe neighborhood. The farms were said to be the most prosperous in Texas.