Houston assumed everything; his bride shrank from everything.  There was a mutual shock amounting almost to repulsion.  She, on her side, probably thought she had found in him only the brute which lurks in man.  He, on the other, repelled and checked, at once grasped the belief that his wife cared nothing for him because she would not meet his ardors with like ardors of her own.  It is the mistake that has been made by thousands of men and women at the beginning of their married lives—­the mistake on one side of too great sensitiveness, and on the other side of too great warmth of passion.

This episode may seem trivial, and yet it is one that explains many things in human life.  So far as concerns Houston it has a direct bearing on the history of our country.  A proud man, he could not endure the slights and gossip of his associates.  He resigned the governorship of Tennessee, and left by night, in such a way as to surround his departure with mystery.

There had come over him the old longing for Indian life; and when he was next visible he was in the land of the Cherokees, who had long before adopted him as a son.  He was clad in buckskin and armed with knife and rifle, and served under the old chief Oolooteka.  He was a gallant defender of the Indians.

When he found how some of the Indian agents had abused his adopted brothers he went to Washington to protest, still wearing his frontier garb.  One William Stansberry, a Congressman from Ohio, insulted Houston, who leaped upon him like a panther, dragged him about the Hall of Representatives, and beat him within an inch of his life.  He was arrested, imprisoned, and fined; but his old friend, President Jackson, remitted his imprisonment and gruffly advised him not to pay the fine.

Returning to his Indians, he made his way to a new field which promised much adventure.  This was Texas, of whose condition in those early days something has already been said.  Houston found a rough American settlement, composed of scattered villages extending along the disputed frontier of Mexico.  Already, in the true Anglo-Saxon spirit, the settlers had formed a rudimentary state, and as they increased and multiplied they framed a simple code of laws.

Then, quite naturally, there came a clash between them and the Mexicans.  The Texans, headed by Moses Austin, had set up a republic and asked for admission to the United States.  Mexico regarded them as rebels and despised them because they made no military display and had no very accurate military drill.  They were dressed in buckskin and ragged clothing; but their knives were very bright and their rifles carried surely.  Furthermore, they laughed at odds, and if only a dozen of them were gathered together they would “take on” almost any number of Mexican regulars.

In February, 1836, the acute and able Mexican, Santa Anna, led across the Rio Grande a force of several thousand Mexicans showily uniformed and completely armed.  Every one remembers how they fell upon the little garrison at the Alamo, now within the city limits of San Antonio, but then an isolated mission building surrounded by a thick adobe wall.  The Americans numbered less than three hundred men.