ery brought up a field-piece;
they loaded it with grape-shot and swept the room, and then at last
they crossed the threshold.

Colonel James Bowie, who brought into use the knife that bears his
name, was sick within another apartment. How that day's noises of
combat roused the old fire within his breast and how he lay there
chafing against the weakness which would not let him raise his body,
one can well imagine. A dozen Mexican officers rushed into the place,
firing as they came. Colonel Bowie waited until the first of them was
within arm's length. Then he reached forth, seized the man by the hair
and, dying, plunged the knife that bore his name hilt-deep into the
heart of his enemy.

So they passed in stifling clouds of powder smoke with the reek of hot
blood in their nostrils. The noon hour saw Davy Crockett and five or
six companions standing in a corner of the shattered walls; the old
frontiersman held a rifle in one hand, in the other a dripping knife,
and his buckskin garments were sodden, crimson. That is the last of
the picture.

"Thermopylae had its messenger of defeat. The Alamo had none." So reads
the inscription on the monument erected in latter years by the State
of Texas to commemorate that stand. The words are true. But the Alamo
did leave a memory and the tale of the little band who fought in the
sublimity of their fierceness while death was slowing their pulses did
much toward the development of a breed whose eyes were narrow,
sometimes slightly slanting, from constant peering across rifle sights
under a glaring sun.

The procession is passing; trapper and Indian fighter; teamsters with
dust in the deep lines of their faces--dust from the long dry trail to
old Santa Fe; stage-drivers who have been sleeping the long sleep
under waving wheat-fields where alkali flats once stretched away
toward the vague blue mountains; and riders of the pony express. A
tall form emerges from the past's dim background, and comes on among
them.

Six feet and an inch to spare, modeled as finely as an old Greek
statue, with eyes of steel grey, sweeping mustache and dark brown hair
that hangs to his shoulders, he moves with catlike grace. Two
forty-fives hang by his narrow hips; there is a hint of the cavalier
in his dropping sombrero and his ornately patterned boots. This is
Wild Bill Hickok; he was to have gone with Custer, but a coward's
bullet cheated him out of the chance to die fighting by the Little Big
Horn an