cans down at Houston came to almost 1,700.

Such is the story of one of San Antonio's Missions. One other has a tale
equally tragic; but all but two are falling to utter ruin. I don't know
whether it would be greater desecration to lay hand on them and save
them, or let them fall to dust. It was nightfall when I went to the
three on the outskirts of the city. Two have little left but the walls
and the towers. A third is still used as place of worship by a little
settlement of Mexicans. The slant light of sunset came through the
darkened, vacant windows, the tiers of weathered stalls, the empty,
twin-towered belfries. You could see where the well stood, the bake
house, the school. Shrubbery planted by the monks has grown wild in the
courtyards; but you can still call up the picture of the cowled priests
chanting prayers. The Missions are ruins; but the hope that animated
them, the fire, the heroism, the dauntless faith, still burn in Texas
blood as the sunset flame shines through the dismantled windows.

CHAPTER XIV

CASA GRANDE AND THE GILA

If someone should tell you of a second Grand Canyon gashed through
wine-colored rocks in the purple light peculiar to the uplands of very
high mountains--a second Grand Canyon, where lived a race of little men
not three feet tall, where wild turkeys were domesticated as household
birds and every man's door was in the roof and his doorstep a ladder
that he carried up after him--you would think it pure imagination,
wouldn't you? The Lilliputians away out in "Gulliver's Travels," or
something like that? And if your narrator went on about magicians who
danced with live rattlesnakes hanging from their teeth and belted about
their waists, and played with live fire without being burned, and walked
up the faces of precipices as a fly walks up a wall--you would think him
rehearsing some Robinson Crusoe tale about two generations too late to
be believed.

Yet there is a second Grand Canyon not a stone's throw from everyday
tourist travel, wilder in game life and rock formation if not so large,
with prehistoric caves on its precipice walls where sleeps a race of
little mummied men behind doors and windows barely large enough to admit
a half-grown white child. Who were they? No one knows. When did they
live? So long ago that they were cave men, stone age men; so long ago
that neither history nor tradition has the faintest echo of their
existence. Where did they live? No, it was not