“At the end of town which you must have entered,” replied Bill. “It’s a small ’dobe house with a garden about it. It stands all alone.”
Both Walter and Ned remembered the house, for they had passed by its very door. There had been a light burning in one of the windows and they had remarked how lonely it looked, as they rode toward it over the trail. And now, when they learned that the girl they had come so far to see was there, and recalled the loneliness of the place, they looked at each other.
“Suppose,” suggested Walter, “we go over that far and take a look at things.”
Ned was willing and eager, and the two Hutchinsons showed an interested willingness.
As the boys passed through the room where Crockett sat with Travis and Bowie and some others, they, in a low voice, told him where they were going.
“It’s rather late,” said the backwoodsman. “And like as not they’ll all be abed. But,” with a nod of the head, “it never does any harm to have a look around.”
San Antonio was one of the oldest Spanish settlements in Texas. The site was first occupied in 1715 as a military post to protect the region from the French, then occupying Louisiana, and also to guard the Franciscan friars whose missions, planted along the San Antonio River, were liable to attack from the Indians.
It was an important town, having a population of about twenty-five hundred, and was a celebrated trading place for the Indians and the Mexicans of the northern provinces.
Under the Franciscans, a great number of Indians had been taught the laws of civilization and religion; great irrigation ditches had been cut to water the soil; fine stone buildings and churches had been erected. But during the period of American filibustering expeditions, and the revolution during which the Mexicans threw off the rule of Spain, the town had been left practically unprotected; the attacks of the fierce people of the plains, the Comanches and Apaches, had been frequent; and so the churches and stone buildings were now ruins, the great ditches choked and useless, the civilized Indians had disappeared.
So it was a very much decayed San Antonio through which the four boys passed on their way to Mrs. Allison’s house.