It is the fashion now to live for the present but the men of
fifty years ago, the men who builded the nation, they
reverenced the past, and therefore they could work for the
future. As Robert Worth rode through the streets of San
Antonio that afternoon, he was thinking, not of his own life,
but of his children's and of the generations which should come
after them.

The city was flooded with sunshine, and crowded with
a pack-train going to Sonora; the animals restlessly
protesting against the heat and flies; their Mexican drivers
in the pulqueria, spending their last peso with their
compadres, or with the escort of soldiers which was to
accompany them--a little squad of small, lithe men, with
round, yellow, beardless faces, bearing in a singular degree
the stamp of being native to the soil. Their lieutenant, a
gorgeously clad officer with a very distinguished air, was
coming slowly down the street to join them. He bowed, and
smiled pleasantly to the doctor as he passed him, and then in
a few moments the word of command and the shouting of men and
the clatter of hoofs invaded the enchanted atmosphere like an
insult.

But the tumult scarcely jarred with the thoughts of his mind.
They had been altogether of war and rumors of war. Every hour
that subtile consciousness of coming events, which makes whole
communities at times prescient, was becoming stronger. "If
the powers of the air have anything to do with the destinies
of men," he muttered, "there must be unseen battalions around
me. The air I am breathing is charged with the feeling of