THE LONE EUGENE P. LYLE JR. THE LONE STAR Of CALIF. LIBRARY, LOS A3GELES 'They were coming by leaps and bounds through the high grass" \Ste fact 4'6} The Lone Star By Eugene P. Lyle, Jr. Author of " The Missourian " Illustrated in colour by PHILIP R. GOODWIN COPYRIGHT, 1907. BY DOUBLEDAT, PAGE & COMPANY PUBLISHED. AUGUST. 1907 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. Valour's Pilgrim .... 3 II. The Tragedy in a Weak Chin . . 13 III. "Big Drunk" ..... 26 IV. "G. T. T." . . . . 39 V. A Redlander Girl . . . . 46 VI. Santa Ana, Hero .... 60 VII. A Sobering of Ambitions . . .71 VIII. The Passion for Space 81 IX. For a Dog ..... 90 X. Nemesis Preserved .... 98 XI. A Vivifying of Politics . . . 105 XII. The Dominant Idol . . . .112 XIII. The Land of Promises . . .123 XIV. The Constant Possibility . . .130 XV. Paul Revere . . . . .142 XVI. The Man's Phase of Trembling . .153 XVII. The Tentacles of the Devilfish . .163 2131203 vi THE LONE STAR CHAPTER PAGE XVIII. The Dozing Colossus of Rhodes . 178 XIX. Taking Inventory . . .185 XX. The Watery Oyster Heart . .192 XXI. Bouquets with Thorns . . . 200 XXII. Wanted: A Bowie, a Milam . 207 XXIII. Three Hundred Men . . ,220 XXIV. Creditors . . . . ,229 XXV. A Word with Nan . . .239 XXVI. Discord 248 XXVII. Under a Black Lace Mantilla . 261 XXVIII. Bliss Deferred . . . .271 XXIX. Jolly Colonel Malaprop . . 285 XXX. Beleaguered .... 297 XXXI. A Species of Atonement . .310 XXXII. One Sunday Morning in Church . 321 XXXIII. The Master Craftsman . .343 XXXIV. "The Dear Prerogative of Life" . 354 XXXV. The Goliad Matins . . .369 XXXVI. "The Runaway Scrape" . . 379 XXXVII. The Eve of San Jacinto . -394 XXXVIII. " One Illustrious Day " . . 410 XXXIX. Conclusion . . . .425 SOME OF THE CHARACTERS HARRY RIPLEY, A pilgrim of valour in Texas, who would achieve courage, and climb to communion with the demigods. PHIL RIPLEY, Of the New ..Orleans Grays, his powder-can of a younger brother. ROSALIE, The sweet girl left behind, bereft even of a thinking part. NAN BUCKALEW, A Redlander girl from up around Nacogdoches, for whom men must be to valour born. OLD MAN BUCKALEW, The mild porcupine who is her father. DEAF SMITH, Scout, the omniscience of the revolution. LUSH YANDELL, A desperado of the Neutral Ground. MR. GRITTON, Dense, supercilious, and insufferable; aware of no man's existence other than his own. vii viii THE LONE STAR THE COLOSSAL HERO GROUP OF TEXAS: SAM HOUSTON JIM BOWIE DAVY CROCKETT BEN MILAM WILL TRAVIS, and STEPHEN AUSTIN, who is the Father of Texas. JAMES BONHAM, . The Alamo's messenger of hope. LIEUTENANT ALMERON DICKINSON, In the Alamo with his wife and his child, the Child of the Alamo. JACK SHACKLBFORD, . Captain of the Red Rovers. JACK CASTLEMAN, Old Indian fighter and misanthrope, whom civ- ilisation is crowding to the edge of the world. CAPTAIN HENRY BROWN AND WACO BROWN, Indian traders. SETTLERS AT DE WITT'S: MAJ. JAMES KERR, Surveyor and acting empresario BYRD LOCKHART, . . Deputy surveyor ZEKE WILLIAMS, .... Alcalde AL MARTIN, .... Storekeeper OLD PAINT CALDWELL VAL BENNET GEORGE COTTLE DAN McCoY Doc JAMES MILLER JOHN SOWELL, . . . Blacksmith COLONEL ALMONTE, . Santa Ana's favourite aide. THE LONE STAR ix His EXCELLENCY OF THE SUPERLATIVE DEGREE, SANTA ANA, President General-in-Chief, the H ombre Funesto of Mexico. LORENZO DE ZAVALA, Governor of the State of Mexico, and later Vice- President of the Republic of Texas. MRS. JANE LONG, A brave filibuster's widow. SENORA ALVAREZ, The Texans' angel of mercy at Goliad. COLONEL FANNIN, One of four hundred martyrs. YAPPE (Lagniappe), Short for good measure, Harry Ripley's black friend. ILLUSTRATIONS "They were coming by leaps and bounds through the high grass" .... Frontispiece FACING PAGE " 'And be a Mexican citizen, a Mexican?' " . 72 " I was the firebrand, lighting the blaze to sweep the wilderness" . . . . . .148 " 'Well, good-bye,' she said wearily" . . 246 THE LONE STAR CHAPTER I VALOUR'S PILGRIM THE white men numbered exactly eleven and Bowie's nigger Jim, and the hundred and sixty- four Indians screeching like thirsty vampires of Hell around them on the prairie were desirous of an even dozen scalps. But the eleven lone white men beat them off. This is, to be sure, rather a brash way to start. But we are in Texas now, you must remember, and you may as well brace yourself at once against the wonder of astounding deeds. You don't know, you know, who those eleven men were. Yet, as Davy Crockett would say, they were the real half-horse, half-alligator breed, with a sprinkling of the steamboat, as grows nowhere else on the face of the universal earth, and are just about the backbone of North America. Nor do you know yet who the man was who led them, the genius incarnate when it came to desperate odds, or you would not marvel so much. Besides, since the thing really and truly happened, what then ? What are you going to do about it ? Protest as you will, yet Fate knows no apology for the overbold, the stupendous, the improbable, that she orders. Nor need the troubadour stammer excuses, either, so long as he can parade the sterling mark of Fact. He is a lucky troubadour, though. His eleven lone white men are ready found, and just the label "It Really Hap- pened," suggests the extraordinary race from which they must have sprung. He does not even long to 4 THE LONE STAR compare tnem with fable-swollen heroes. That would be the disaster abhorred of his art anti-climax. We behold the eleven white men at work, which is enough. Cotton balls of smoke puff up, and hover over the little scrubby timber island where the Americans lie hidden, and the naked redskins on mustangs circle round and round, and yelp blood chants. The white men are very earnest; and they are a little out of humour, perhaps. They might be sullen cobblers, driving pegs overtime except when one of them is hit. Then the bloodshed gets personal. A Berserker in fringed raw- hide leaps from cover. "Where's the reddie that done that?" he roars, as though every demon out there were not possessed of exactly the same intention. "Show me the one 'et killed Mack! There, Mack, they killed Mack!" It was a voracious stomach for fighting that those men had. That all of them had, except one. . . The one whose stomach was not for fighting was only just beginning to realise the same. But he knew it now. He knew it in the deathly retching of his soul, in his soul's panic to be away from there, one little mile away across the broad range, which had so many, many miles to spare. But Geography is inexorable. Of all the world's acres, a man with his boots on requires for dying only so much as is covered by his shadow at high noon. The exception of the eleven white men blindly picked the flint of his rifle. He knew terror indeed, but that which brought the tears was the loathing of self. However, he was not altogether a man grown as yet. He did not have the man's poise, and the discovery astounded him. " 'To mix in fight,' " he had said to himself, quoting valorous authority, " 'is all I ask of heaven.' " But now he saw himself written down a baby, a whimpering baby. It made him hate those who were men. He almost wished that the perspiring VALOUR'S PILGRIM 5 heroes who shielded his life would turn craven also. Then they would all meet death in a common shame. And yet if these men proved as mortally weak as he, he would not have cared to live. Now there must be no question of my slandering this poor boy. On the contrary I feel that I am an especially competent mirror for his emotions, because it happens that the young fellow was myself. Be charitable, there- fore, for you must know that, when we were warned against the Indians two nights previously, I had exulted. More than that, I had fretted because our council of war had smacked so of caution. It was stale dis- illusion when even James Bowie, our leader, gravely calculated the distance to an old abandoned Spanish fort. Then all the day before we had scurried like rabbits. But the November rains had bitten sluices across our trail, which was a bad and rocky enough one in any case, and night had found us still on the open plain. We were within six miles of the old fort, but nobody knew that, and we made camp as usual, except that the veteran plainsmen chose for it a possible battleground. " 'Long 'bout the only covuh we'll meet up with to-night," Bowie had said, drawing rein and lifting his chin toward a thick little grove of live-oak saplings and cactus. He rose in his stirrups and pointed to a creek beyond. " Watuh too," he added. What followed was for me the beginning of life. It was the eve of a boy's first fight. The others prepared to meet the business with about as much emotion as a settler would stake a field for ploughing. My eyes, though, feasted as on the substance of a dream, and my greed to help got me considerably in the way, and got my feelings hurt too, as there were rough words at my green awkwardness. Lush Yandell, a huge skulking, hairy 6 THE LONE STAR beast of a man, was the worst, but you will have enough of him later, as I certainly did. In the centre of our matte, or timber island, we cleared a space where we could hobble our horses and sleep. Next we made a circular path just within the outer edge of the thicket, in order to command the prairie on all sides from behind the screen of underbrush. So we were military engineers on occasion, and earned our supper. We enjoyed it too, but that was customary. There were hoecake and buffalo hump, and hoecake and wild honey, and a wild turkey on a hickory spit, and persimmons, and that heritage of ours from Louisiana, drip coffee, and last of all, a smoke. Lush Yandell had a vile, blackened, red-clay pipe, the stench of which was a libel on the blessings of tobacco. But Colonel Bowie gave a little backward jerk of the head, faintly smiling in the significant way he had, and Yandell got up like a surly dog and removed himself to leeward. Bowie, you see, had trained Yandell earlier in the expedition. After pipes, we tramped over our cleared spot for rattlers, and bound our horse-hair lariats together to spread the magic circle which no snake might cross, and here we cuddled into blankets and buffalo robes. Except the two who had drawn the first watch, they were all quickly in heavy sleep. But not I! Lying there, I wondered at them for sleeping. Nor did I need to be roused when my turn came at midnight. Wide awake, and panting even, I leaped up and shouldered my rifle. The earth was chilled since sundown, and I had to move briskly during those two hours around and round the motte. But the air deep in my lungs made me brave there alone under the stars. My brow would furrow severely, as though acquiring the habit, and at the least soft stirring in grass, up would go my rifle in a kind of delicious fright. Thus I nibbled VALOUR'S PILGRIM 7 at danger, though an under-consciousness of the senses told me there was none, as yet. Now what is more natural than for a boy to imagine himself as he would like to be? But this present busi- ness of mine was very like trying for fellowship with the demigods. The times were of another Troy, as pregnant of deeds as an epic. There must be heart- breaks laid up for any boy who hoped to measure himself by a standard like that. Until now my home had been New Orleans, my knowl- edge of the world the shadowed calm of school back East. But books had mostly fretted me. For a text I wanted life ; that is what I wanted. Just outside my schoolroom, like "a gang of great boys," Americans were thrilling in the awakening instincts of a new race. For the first time they had a President of the United States who was really of the people, and gloriously, rashly, they dared him further yet; and, as everybody knows, Andy Jackson was not one to take a dare. Prophetic and imperious were those great boys. In a lusty child's unwitting cruelty they were beginning to feel that they would need more room, and they had a mind to take it, too. History fairly throbbed in the making, and the fledging of a hero seemed the question of a minute. It was little wonder that I chafed under a sense of being deprived. Books and imagination aggravated the leash. If some professor, or Rosalie, who was forever hoisting me up on a pedestal, evolved the scholar from my brow, why, that only got me the more restive. It was not fair. What call had physiognomy to hack out one's destiny? I craved the privilege of doing that for myself. Why shouldn't a brow foster brave ideals as well as musty essays on Transcendentalism? Why should it doom a boy to the robe, when his soul yearned 8 THE LONE STAR so for a battle-axe? But this was rebellious heresy, and I kept it secret. People would laugh, except Rosalie. I a fire-eater, and my sensitive curve of mouth! I an intrepid warrior, and that girlish bloom of cheek! Dear, how I used to writhe at the faintest mention of a blush! But my dolefulest anguish was in the matter of jaw. My jaw lacked heft. Yet I was privately resolved that destiny must not be held in a chin, nor in any fashion of bone structure. So my hope and despair, my one radiant star for aspiration, was ever and always the mind's picture of myself in the way of stalwart achievement. Feeling my growth, what there was of it at fourteen or fifteen years of age, I sought to give my longings vent with rifle or shotgun. The game around New Orleans supplied none of that danger to the hunter which makes for the only genuine sport, but wanting better, I passed my vacations among the swamps and bayous. Early one morning, when out after wild geese, I came upon the notorious Duel of the Sandbar that all Louisi- ana talked about for so long afterward. It was a stupid enough brawl; curses and firearms and just cynical bravery. Yet for me it more resembled posi- tive endeavour than aught ever beheld until that day. I stood rooted, with mouth agape, tingling to the marrow. The affair had begun with a single duel, but two of the opposing seconds could not let the chance pass to settle an account of their own, and quickly both sides were at it generally. As many as fifteen men were engaged. Already three lay on the sand. One, lean, lithe, heavy-boned, patrician was swaying sullenly. He had curly reddish hair and sideburns. One hand was pressed to his ribs. With the other he tried to aim his weapon. But an antagonist from behind clubbed a pistol on his skull, and as he crashed to his knees a second VALOUR'S PILGRIM 9 man leaped on him. Yet even then he flung them off, and reclining against a log, he aimed once more at his first man. He and the other fired together, and at that my lean giant pitched his length, face downward, and I could see the splendid limbs relax and the crimson break like wine over his fine linen. Instantly his first antagonist was leaning over him with a sword cane. As in a spasm my giant rolled over on his back, heavily, like a man asleep. But his eyes were open, and they were piercing, steel-gray eyes; and as he rolled, his arm swung a stiff circle, and a long knife in his hand met the breast over him, and sank so deep that the hand fell from it and thumped palm upward on the sand. His antagonist pitched across his body, and died there. These two men were the principals in the duel, and now the fighting stopped. Both sides gathered round my red-haired patrician of the knife, and laboured over him, but they shook their heads and gave him up as already gone. Then, at their verdict, the eyelids flickered, and the barest tracery of a smile drew the purple lips. "You all will obse've, gentlemen," the words came, faint and thin, "that theh's been a a ceht'n disrega'd of the the social amen'ties heahbouts." I sucked in my breath. Books and imagination, books and imagination, whatever had they given me, like unto this? For days afterward I haunted the big white hotel in the Rue Royale where they had taken him, and haunted it until the man who was as good as dead walked forth again. He was emaciated, bloodless, but he was a towering, superb, red-headed man, full six feet three, and as he came from his sick-bed now, he was laughing among his friends, and the ring of his laugh won straight to the heart. My idolatrous eyes followed him until he swerved roundly into the next street, until he io THE LONE STAR vanished, to prey on what further high adventure the old town might offer. It had been no trouble to identify my chevalier of the knife. Everybody knew Jim Bowie from up around Catahoula Parish, who was always ready "for fight or frolic, war or electioneering." Eight or ten years before, when this Jim Bowie was hardly twenty, my father had known him as among those Americans in the New Philippines Texas who were fighting the Spaniards for Mexican independence. Bowie's impulses were frankly primeval, and at the period of the duel they were turned to joyous daredeviltry. He had been buying "black ivory" for a dollar a pound from Lafitte the pirate to smuggle them off the slave ships and sell them. Thus it was that just now our Creole town knew his mocking gray eyes again while he scattered his loot. That business on the sandbar was merely an episode. There was, though, an inimitable suggestion of polish in Bowie's reckless gaiety. He was sensitive too, and felt it keenly when decent people veiled their looks. Something of this may account for his leaving town soon after, and when we heard of him again, he was once more in Texas. It appeared, also, that he was become a sobered man of worth. He had married the daughter of the Mexican vice-governor in San Antonio, and at the wed- ding a Mexican general, Santa Ana, had stood for him. As for myself, meanwhile, I had contrived nothing more notable than to grow along into my nineteenth year. Yet this was something, because each year behind me counted that much nearer to the day when I also might go to Texas. Here was a notion that had hooked itself into my ambitions five years before, and it had been fastening deeper ever since. But such was the way with notions; they were like fish-hooks. And VALOUR'S PILGRIM n because it hurt so to pull one out, I rarely tried it and people got to calling me bull-headed. But no youngster could be blamed for wanting to go to Texas. Not to want to go was to write oneself a fossil. Mr. Stephen Austin's prospectus urging colonists to settle on his grant out there was an insidious engine of torture, so fearful was I that the vast wilderness would all be taken up before I could grow enough. Next, the Mexicans took alarm at the few hundred American families whom they had welcomed to their frontier province as a buffer against the Indians, and this added the last irresistible dash to the Texan sauce. Like the Angles and Saxons invited over by the Britons the American settlers declined to retire. Soon The Commercial Bulletin of our town was filled with accounts of Mexican garrisons in Texas, of colonists in prison, of women insulted. But next we read how the colonists rose against the soldiery, and drove every one of them out of Texas. For instance, Bowie and fifty others met and defeated the garrison of two hundred at Nacogdoches, and presented them as prisoners to Mr. Austin. Well, after exploits like these, there's no need to say that that notion of mine grew as insistent as the very "Old Harry." And then, when the Mexican president decreed that Americans should be excluded from Texas, of course, there was no longer the breath of real life for me unless I could draw it in that same forbidden land. I was nineteen, too, and my father gave in. He secured me a passport, and wrote me a letter to Bowie. I nearly changed my mind, though, when it came to telling my mother good-bye, but tumbled back into my first mind quickly enough when Rosalie started to crying and wanted a gold button as soon as they made me a colonel. You see, Rosalie was not my sister, and her crying was I2 THE LONE STAR different. And then a baby brother of mine, who could barely count thirteen years, threw his toy rifle to his hip and shattered my reflection in our handsomest mirror because he couldn't go too. He was having his spanking when I left. With my dog, my blooded colt Boreas, my nigger, and a ranger's outfit according to the ideas of New Orleans tailors, I reached San Antonio de Bexar to find that Bowie was organising an expedition to some old silver mines about a hundred miles northwest. He had, more- over, the kind permission of his lordship, the Jefe Politico of the province of Texas. The excitement over driving out the Mexican garrisons, it should be explained, had quieted down. There had been a simultaneous revolu- tion down at the Mexican capital, headed by General Santa Ana, and when Santa Ana prevailed, he graciously adopted the Texan uprising as a part of his own. So I understood now why my father had let me come, since I arrived too late for the festivities. My only consolation was the chance to join Bowie's expedition. We were out only a few days when some Comanches on the Bandera trail warned us against a scalping party of their cousins, the Tehuacanies, who were the worst horse- thieves on the range. Thus it had come to pass that I was standing guard under the stars, a man at last, among men. And you may not wonder that I listened, and tried, tried so very hard, to "catch the fates, low-whispered in the breeze." CHAPTER II THE TRAGEDY IN A WEAK CHIN MORNING dawned, however, without any Indians. One could not imagine them, either; could not construct them into the boundlessly placid landscape. I was disappointed, of course, but it annoyed me because this feeling was vaguely tinctured with relief, too. We bolted our corn pone and tasso, and we were already cinching up to leave when the gray mist of the prairie lifted like a curtain to slow music, and revealed a solitary Indian knee deep in the undulating grass. His gaze was bent on the trail, but he straightened, and saw us as we saw him. As the curtain rolled on back toward the horizon, we perceived his fellows behind him strung out along the trail, and silhouetted against the great blazing disc of the sun like so many equestrian bronzes. They could not be real, they Well, I laughed nervously at this wholesale lot of statuary littered over the grass, motionless, posing, as though awaiting purchasers. Their hands shaded their eyes, and they looked to where their scout pointed his lance. Then, when they discovered us whipping our ponies back to the motte, they clapped hand to mouth and let out a gleeful ki-yi that put ants into my veins. But they did not become the whirlwind at once. No, they had to get ready first, not in priming rifles or barbing arrows, but with smearing coloured grease on their lean jaws and bony chests. They were like actors making up, and the bizarre unreality persisted, even when they had stripped for action and were mounting. 13 i 4 THE LONE STAR They simply would not fit in with broad daylight. Until now my terrors had been of the night-time only, and morning always dispelled them. But one word stuck in my drying throat. "Scalps!" It was the bogie of our mammy nurses. It meant the skin ripped from the head, but I could not cap the meaning to my head. Yet for all that, the ants seemed to have gotten down in the roots of my hair. A voice made me jump. "Hey theuh, you, stuh lively now!" I obeyed, and dropped where Bowie stationed me in the circular path of our thicket. Maybe it was the fumbling way in which I tried to point my gun through the bushes: or, for all I know, my face was chalk white; but at any rate Bowie paused over me. "Bettuh have stayed with yo' fathuh, eh Harry?" he said. "No," I answered bitterly, "I I've stayed with him too long already." What price would I not have given, in that moment, for only a year of the world's stiffening! This Bowie, for instance, so mild and cool and gentle in our hideous peril, at my age he had been already a formidable leader of men. And here was I, letting him pat me reassuringly on the back! And worse, I was grateful to him for it, in spite of myself. The eleven of us were hidden from each other as we crouched in the chaparral, and it seemed that I was as one against the horde out there where yells and hoof- beats merged into a thunderous roar. I saw them com- ing, yet could not awaken to the unfamiliar thing called Resistance. When men decreed my father, my tutors, our family doctor I had obeyed. The habit was strong, -and boys, you know, like Mr. Clay's compro- mises, are forever subject to amendment. So when THE TRAGEDY IN A WEAK CHIN 15 these demons came galloping, decreeing my death, I didn't like it, naturally, any more than a switch, or a hundred lines of Greek, or herb tea. But that I was to resent it did not at first enter my head. Then an arrow swished through the leaves. Heavens, they had no right to do that! There was the weapon in my hand, and I awoke, dazedly, to my manhood. I myself, and not others, must henceforth decree what concerned myself. This was to be a man, As I pressed the gun to my shoulder, my teeth chat- tered, and I ground them together. Yet the muzzle swayed drunkenly from side to side. My indignation knew no bounds. What was the matter with me ? The in-drawn breath was whistling through my teeth, and then, with no warning at all, my stomach collapsed, and I was vomiting. Could it be that that this was that loathsome thing I had read about and despised that this was Cowardice? "No!" and I do not know but that I screamed it aloud. "No, no!" And those devils out there, they were the cause! But they should pay for it, they Oh well, shame turned to rage just like that. But our thicket would be trampled underfoot, and we too. They were coming down on us like a hurricane on a cornfield, as I've heard Davy Crockett describe just such a thing. The din of yells, the volleying muskets, the storm of dust, it seemed that death had already enveloped us, when their furious charge broke, and swerved into two circles around our motte. Their naked bodies gleamed in the low-lying shafts of the morning sun. Eagle feathers bristled back with the wind from long scalp-locks, and from the streaming manes and tails of their ponies. They were the alle- gory for Speed, and other things. The vermilion 1 6 THE LONE STAR streaks on their lumpy cheek bones, the murderous screeching, the rifle or lance twirled overhead, here was human flesh monstrously organised into a machine to kill. And it was very odd. It was an enormity. The eleven white men, unseen, unheard, stealthily waiting, they were like hunted hares cowering in the brush. Or was there in their patience a menace more deadly than all this fearful warwhooping? An abrupt explosion near me suggested the answer, for one of the barbarians rose from his horse as by galvanic impulse, then drooped back on the haunches like a rag, then rolled off into the grass. I heard a low grunt of satisfaction. "Got him!" Bob Armstrong, the cleanest shot among us, had done that thing. There were more reports, and more frantic ponies out there went riderless. It devolved on me to kill somebody also. But my finger refused its pressure on the trigger. The horror of just that little motion clap- ping a soul in eternity palsied my will. Then a bullet that threw dirt in my eyes made me understand that the question was rather of my own soul's voyaging. A spasmodic twitch, and I knew that I had fired. But the gallant buck impinged on my rifle sight moved on as before, the scarlet Mexican banda still trailing from his naked waist. I smiled, which was my first sign of complete sanity that morning. I need not have been so concerned over the red man's eternity. The first harrowing business of war cries and bran- dished weapons was only conventional greeting. But it failed. The white men did not take panic and leave cover. The Indians fell faster, too, as they rode nearer, and soon they began to veer at a tangent from their circles, and to settle down behind the isolated trees and rocks. Some retired to the shoulder of a mound- like hill, and dropped arrows on us, hoping for random THE TRAGEDY IN A WEAK CHIN 17 hits. Ten or twelve riflemen opened fire from the bank of the creek, not thirty yards away. They were keen shots, too, and we moved as quick as grasshoppers each time we let them have our smoke for a target. But the Indians showed their heads over the bank to aim, and in due course our men had registered with a bullet in each head. "Now then, Jim," said Bowie, in the tone of con- ferring a privilege, "suppose you take the canteens and fetch us some watuh." Black Jim Bowie, as we called Bowie's negro, opened his cavernous mouth. "Jim!" and his master smiled reproachfully "you ceht'nly aren't more 'fraid of Indians than of me, Jim?" The quaking darky knew his own littleness in that smile. "No ma'sah, yeah ma'sah," he blubbered. "Yeah, I'se gwine" and he did, catching up the canteens, and running to the creek. I could credit now the legends among us of Bowie's fantastic pranks, when the spirit of fun and mockery rollicked hand in hand with his great strength. He would, it was said, lasso an alligator waddling from swamp to bayou, and stand on the monster's back, and goad him on with laughter. None of us imagined that there were any Indians left at the creek, but all at once we heard a shriek of mortal terror. Then Black Jim came scrambling over the edge of the bank, and behind him was an Indian flourishing a tomahawk. "Quick! " cried Bowie. "Quick, who's loaded? Who's loaded?" Some of the men groaned. Their guns were empty. "Yes, I " I faltered. My gun was loaded, I remembered, but as I raised it Bob Armstrong snatched it away and fired. i8 THE LONE STAR " Got him! " he muttered. Black Jim stumbled among us, and his canteens were filled with water, too. "Bress yuh, Mahs Bob, bress yuh!" he panted. "Bless him twice, Jim," said Bowie, "for he surely saved you twice, once from the Reddie, and once from Peachblow heah." The pink that stung my cheek justified the epithet, and I knew the chagrin in a slender build. I wanted very much to thrash Bowie. It was humiliation enough, besides, when my very gun was not my own. I might load the weapon indeed, but that was the part of any frontier woman. The Indians meantime were off on their little hill having a pow-wow. Jealous tribal economy of their own numbers had forced them to craft, and the lull while we waited for them to plot our doom was ghastlier than ki-yi's. "Grass will burn," said Deaf Smith in a short growl. Deaf Smith was a little wiry scout of about forty-five who had been seasoned to the toughness and dryness and colour of brown wrinkled leather. He was a lone silent man who had fought over these plains during twenty years. He uttered words grudgingly, but they were always heavy words. He knew now what the Indians would do before they knew it themselves. Others besides myself stirred uneasily at his verdict. Lush Yandell, for all his dark boasting of prowess in the Neutral Ground, burst forth with a vile oath of protest. He wet a hairy finger between his lips and crooked it in the air. "Yuh cow's hind foot!" He turned, leering, on Deaf Smith. "That grass'ull hev to burn purt' nigh the way the wind blows eh? An' that's pig-tight! An' it so happens thet she's a-blowin' t'uds us /rww the crik, THE TRAGEDY IN A WEAK CHIN 19 with yuh kind permission, an' all we hev to do is to keep 'em frum comin' on this here side the crik to set her on fire eh?" Deaf Smith absently played a tattoo with two fingers on the back of his ear. "Eh, you lightnin '-struck old stump," Yandell stormed, "you heered me sayin' " "Words," grunted Deaf Smith, "jes' words." "But Deaf," objected Bowie, "so far Yandell seems to be right." " How? Oh yes. But everybody has plenty o' time." "You mean the Reddies will keep us heah till the wind shifts?" Of course! It was too childish for even a nod of the head, and the taciturn old scout's only reply was by example. He turned from us to our clearing in the centre of the grove, where he began scraping away the twigs and dry leaves. Bowie had fought against the Spaniards with Deaf Smith, and he perceived now that the scout's answer was a good one. The arrows were falling again, but Bowie set us to work piling up a hedge of stone and logs around the clearing. Here we laid the man Mack who was killed early in the fight, and also Dan Buchanan with a slug in his thigh, who chewed on a roll of "bitter twist" and grumbled because he had no chance to get even. Here too we covered our baggage with wet blankets, and threw our horses and hog-tied them. Armstrong and Yandell had been keeping an eye on the creek, and after a while several Indians with flaming brands tried to climb up the bank. None succeeded, however, and each failure cost them a life. Then we in the motte heard Yandell 's voice. "Gawd, Gawd, Gawd!" "Now what?" shouted Bowie. 2 o THE LONE STAR The hulk of a man crashed through the brush to us. He held up a claw-like finger, and his mouth worked speechlessly. "Well," said Bowie, "and what merry greeting have we heah?" Yandell's hairy claw was thrust into his face. "It's on this side, I'm tellin' you," he cried. "It's went an' cooled on this side here!" We understood now. The wind had shifted, and had freshened into the bargain. A crackling sound, low and vicious, grew on our ears, followed by exultant yells. We hastened to the edge of the motte. Off near the little hill black jets of smoke darted out of the grass here and there. The forked tongues snatched at each other and thickened into a long, swirling, inky wave that rose higher and higher and bellied out toward us. The grass before it curled and shrivelled and leaped to flame, and under the smoke there was a blaze like a roaring furnace when the door is opened for an instant. Behind this dense curtain the Indians were dragging off their dead, but howling their glee too, and altogether adding the last needed touch to a picture of Hell and Hell's fiends. Bowie's eyes hardened deep in his head. "Ugh, I hate 'em!" he muttered. "They're so all- fiahed noisy." The oncoming breaker, of flame now and crested with smoke, leaped to the grove as though sucked into a vacuum, and caught at the first branches and hanging moss. The imps split the air at their shrillest. They danced joyously while they waited for the end. We scrambled back to our clearing in the centre of the motte. "Work now, work!" shouted Bowie. He was himself a fury of activity. His jacket was slashed, his face was begrimed in the smoke rolling over us, and he was bleeding. But he was happy. I had never e.en 21 so intense, so concentrated a happiness in human expres- sion. He yelled cheerily to a man here, shoved another there, and we worked. With our knives, with bare hands, we rooted up sod, scooped up dirt, raising our barricade, or beat at the sparks falling thicker and thicker. But he was always the quickest to a serpent of flame, to have his heel on it, and great boulders he handled like marbles. " It's sure work now, gentlemen ! " His heartening words were so many caresses. "No, don't fiah. You can't open your powder horns again with these spa'hks flying. Our last shot is for 'em when they get heah. And then, our knives. Unduh- stand, gentlemen, our knives!" It is strange that afterward these things came back to me so clear and sharp, because at the time I knew nothing, not even what I was doing myself. Bowie has told me, though, that he seemed to be always stepping on me. He had never imagined before, he said, that such vehement profanity could come from a rosy- cheeked Cupid of a boy. Once, too, he saw me feverishly trying to cover my prostrate horse with a saddle blanket. Gaining our barricade, the flames spread on either side, and circled it, until we were virtually inside the furnace. Myriads of sparks swept through the air, or pounced down as though they had beaks and claws. We grabbed frantically at our hair, or slapped ourselves, or hopped about when stung underfoot, and all the while our poor horses kicked to break their ropes and screamed in agony. Around me the desperate men pounded and battled, with robes, with blankets, with bare hands. I remember how hard they breathed. We might have been victims at the stake. The Indians dancing around us considered us so, indeed. Oh, why, out of the black mystery of the ages, had they, the red, and I, the white, been brought to meet in 22 THE LONE STAR this one hour of all Time, on this one acre of all Space? And why, of all the Universe, did they want my scalp? I couldn't account for them as human beings, that is all. For me they were an Inanimate Death, like the mountain wave, or the cold of trackless snow. Their screeching was blood thirst bursting into expression. But I could not understand blood thirst, unless in wolves. I must have been going into delirium, I suppose, but I struggled out of its mazes to discover that I was lying face downward on the ground, with my head buried in my arms. Charred smells weighted the air, and the rock of our barricade, where my head touched it, was hot enough to blister the skin. The roar of flames had ceased, but there were fusilades and curses and groans. I crowded my head deeper into my arms, and my spine twitched as I imagined Indians leaping the barricade and pausing over me with lifted hatchets. Ho, now, but was this the man's part I was to play? There were worse things in the world than lifted hatchets, and what if one's spine did twitch? My hand went out and groped along the ground. It closed over my rifle. Next I must lift myself to the level of our stone hedge, and then I must fire. The shooting rose to a deafening volley over me, but I was so intent on what I was to do that I took no note of the comparative silence that followed, nor of the Indian war cries dying out farther and farther away. But as I lifted my head, there was a report behind me, and the lead spattered on the rock over my head. I ducked, and hugged the earth involun- tarily. For a period I quivered there. The whole dreary struggle with myself must begin all over again. I raised my head. I braced my arms to the ground. With each inch higher I suffered, in each one achieved I gloried, and from my hands I gained my knees. Then with a wild plunge I flung my gun across the breastwork THE TRAGEDY IN A WEAK CHIN 23 and pulled the trigger. I stared blankly. The motte was smouldering, the prairie around it was blackened, but the Indians were gone. In the distance I saw them moving out of range. A great raucous laugh went up behind me. I swung round, and there they were, our men, tattered, begrimed, exhausted, wounded, but the countenance of each was lively with merriment. Their eyes were on me. The guffaw had come from Lush Yandell. Bowie was smiling. Deaf Smith's leathery visage bore a quizzical look. At first I was all joy to find them still living. Then I saw that they were laughing at me. Bowie's rifle was in his hand, and he began to reload. I understood, now, that it was he who had fired that shot against the rock which had made me drop and tremble. My shame was so overwhelming that I felt that it would blight me absolutely in men's eyes until death closed my own. But it held the Texans only a trivial second. "Well, gentlemen," said Bowie, laughing the incident from his mind, "it's been a ha'ud day's work. Suppose we go and wash up a bit." Two men remained on guard, and the rest of us limped stiffly down to the creek. I caught my lip between my teeth, and followed. I tried to throw my shoulders back. No use! Rigidity of pose was not self-respect. Ah, one could be brave so easily in the scholar's den. One could toughen nerves to thongs of bull-hide in the financier's swivel chair. But Texas was different. Here it was the naked elemental epoch of man to man. It was the epoch of the knife. And here was I, like La Fontaine's wax taper, trying to make myself a brick by plunging into the fire. The best thing for me was to go home. But can you imagine the bitterness in such a confession to one's own self? There I stood on the 2 4 THE LONE STAR threshold of life, yet fearfully doubting if I were man enough to step beyond. I must draw back from all that had been so fondly expected of life. Once down at the creek, I kept away from the others, and on my knees listlessly began dashing the water over my face. But soon I discovered that I was leaning on my hands, and gazing moodily into the clear, mirror- like pool under me. It was with some dull idea of facing out this unlovely business, I suppose. There had been the exaltation of standing guard the night before, and wishing my mother could see me. And now ugh! Then there had been the vision of Rosalie's idolising blue eyes. I did not want to think of Rosalie. But my mother Well, I may as well own up that the tears cut loose and began leaking down one by one into the water. I fell to counting them mechanically as they spattered, which brought my gaze to my own reflection in the pool. My features were streaked and gashed and bruised. There was a big lump over one eye. Perhaps it was a falling limb that had knocked me unconscious, and brought me down with my face to the ground. I gazed steadily at myself, and commenced to take note. But what held me at last was my trembling lower lip, and a mouth partly open. I clenched my jaws together. But that scarcely helped. No knotted cords of power showed themselves. Abruptly, despairingly, I sobbed aloud: " It's it's my chin! " I got wearily to my feet, altogether the lonesomest lone boy in all Texas. As I turned to leave, I started shamefacedly. The old scout, Deaf Smith, was there, and he had been observing me. In his black eyes was the same quizzical expression as when they were all making a holiday of my anguish. " Look here, son," he said in a curt voice that made me flush imploringly, "look here, I'd relish shaking hands." THE TRAGEDY IN A WEAK CHIN 25 I stared at him open-mouthed. But he was all gravity. After all he had not followed me here to prolong the taunt. "I would, heaps," he added, as short and jerky as before. Suddenly I took the old, weatherbeaten hand; and clung to it, too. I would have laid my heart in that leathery palm, had I been able. "Because," he went on, answering my puzzled look, "you whopped the darnedest Injin a man most ever meets; I mean yo' own self, son." My jaws snapped down tight. I changed my mind about going home. CHAPTER III "BIG DRUNK" AS the old scout turned with me from the creek, he pointed to Lush Yandell, who was stooping over a dead Indian, knife in hand. I looked closer, and turned away, sickened. Leering, ravenous, the hairy des- perado was cutting off enough skin to make for him- self a tobacco wallet. "Leastwise," grunted Deaf Smith, "that's what ain't the proof of a man." Pondering which, for no one could ever say how deep his meaning carried, I went back to our camp in the motte. All that night we raised our fortification breast high and stored up water in canteens and skin bags. We could hear the Indians off on their little hill, where they shot their mortally wounded and howled mournful dirges. But Deaf Smith was no longer the prophet of evil. "They got enough," he said. Their chief, a spectacular paladin with buffalo horns in his war bonnet, had been killed, and when they saw us so well intrenched the next morning, they got themselves away from there. This might be a ruse, though, and we stayed where we were for seven days more. We had three wounded men, whom Deaf Smith poulticed up with oak juice and mud, to keep off gangrene. We needed more horses, too, to replace those killed, and we rigged up a flagpole and burned a fire at night, in case any friendly Indians might be passing that way. It was, altogether, a pretty close analogy to being shipwrecked on a reef. One day 26 "BIG DRUNK" 27 Bob Armstrong set out with an extra horse, and came back that night laden with buffalo meat he had killed. At last, no help appearing, and everybody being able and impatient to move on, we formed our crippled caravan and bore off northwest to a wooded upland called the San Saba hills. In the valley beyond, near a river of the same name, we camped among some old walls twelve feet thick surrounding the bleak ruins of a chapel. They were the crumbling monument to a past gloomy tyranny. Here had been the usual Spanish mission and presidio. Here vagabond soldiers had gathered natives for the friars to convert. Here, as usual, the red child of nature had languished under midnight devotions to his Father in Heaven, under the whip, under austere penance for every free breath he durst draw. I could not wonder that here too, and again as usual, the Spaniard had failed to civilise the wilderness, and was at last impelled to ask the Anglo- Saxon to do it for him. Seventy years before a party of bravos, as the untamed Indians were called, had stopped at the presidio when the soldiers were away, and offered to trade furs for corn. But once inside they snatched knives from under their buffalo robes and put an end to the dark story once for all. Only one priest got back to San Antonio alive. But even he needed a miracle on the way. A certain river divided its waters for him to pass, and this river henceforth became the Brazos de Dios; though why the Arms of God stayed folded during the massacre itself the pious friar neglected to explain. The next day we came to the old silver mine in the Comanche range where the good priests had worked their Indian converts. Bowie, however, did not over- flow with that enthusiasm one might expect after we had passed through so much to get here. His deep-set gray 28 THE LONE STAR eyes lighted with banter as Lush Yandell went burrowing like a famished wolf through the deserted tunnels. With Deaf Smith Bowie lounged on his blanket and smoked near where Black Jim was fixing supper. Later, while we ate, he peered from one glum counte- nance to another in whimsical tolerance. "You all satisfied?" he questioned gently. Yandell was scowling at a piece of ore from the diggings. Now he flung it vengefully at a coyote hovering darkly beyond the range of our camp fire. "Satisfied?" he growled. "Where's the silver we come fur eh? They ain't none left, an' that's "Exactly what I mean," said Bowie. "You're satis- fied there's no use staying heah?" "We sure are," returned Deaf Smith stoutly. It would be difficult to pack more strategy in three words. "Then," said Bowie, "we might's well be moving on, I reckon." And we did, starting early the next morning. But instead of turning back toward San Antonio, Deaf Smith chose for us a barely perceptible trace heading north- east. Yandell was alongside in a moment, asking Bowie what it meant. "W'y, I s'pose, Lush," said Bob Armstrong, "it's account of them hos-tiles to the south. Got to go round 'em, don't we?" But when Yandell had fallen behind out of hearing Armstrong looked at Bowie reproachfully. "Of coh'se, Bob," I heard Bowie say, "I'll tell you, and the rest too, except that woolly Yahoo of a Yandell. He was just bound he'd come, you know, soon as he heard we were after silver mines. But I reckon also," said Bowie, "that his lordship, the Jefe Politico, wanted him to come." "You mean he's a spy? Just let me " "BIG DRUNK" 29 "No, no, Bob, don't huh't him yet. He'll not likely go with us, all the way. He's got some reasons of his own for keeping out of the States." "Living Ginger, Jim, we're not going " "Well, just to the Territory, say." Bob Armstrong looked the admiration a good mystery should always evoke. He put the question tingling on my own lips. "Lord bless us, but what we going there for?" Bowie smiled in a far-off sort of way. "Just may- be," he said, "because there's a ceht'n American we'll be needing just maybe, understand? in Texas before long." "Shucks, Jim, why don't you say a thousand certain Americans, with shotguns? " "This one is a thousand," said Bowie quietly. "Not not Andy Jackson?" Whereupon it was suggested to Bob that he should just breathe along, and in good time he might learn more. And as for the San Saba diggings; pshaw, Deaf Smith could have told us before we started that the old gopher holes weren't worth a coon skin. But the Mexican officials were getting that infernal curious about the doings of settlers nowadays, our expedition simply had to have some good excuse. A weighty intrigue was afoot, so much was apparent, and perhaps I had not come to Texas too late after all. Lofty imagining henceforth vivified the big country through which we travelled, where only big men and big ideas might flourish, and where the little and the mean shrivelled as leaves in a blasting norther. This big country I made already the setting of a drama as colossal in proportion, when the big and the little would meet in tragic conflict, and end with the Inevitable, as is the way of tragedies. 3 o THE LONE STAR We crossed the river and mountains bearing the name, though hardly the description, of Colorado. Over rolling plains we followed a trail that was a thoroughfare before the time of the white men, before even the time of the red men. It had been made by buffalo herds, which unerringly blazed the shortest path to a ford or the easiest through the hills. We were glad of this royal road when we struck the weed prairie, for here the tall grass closed over our heads, and a man ten feet off the trail was lost. We rounded the High Peak, and forded the Brazos, and threaded that wooded gulf stream of the prairie known as the Cross Timber. We dined on hominy flavoured with hickory nuts at a Caddo village, and the Indians here traded us some horses. We had antelope, and elk, and wild turkey, and bob-whites, and swamp rabbits in the timbered bottoms, and as Dan Buchanan was a tolerable bee hunter, liking honey and "bitter twist" impartially, we had wild honey too. Altogether we lived as the elect of the earth, except that I hardened slowly to rattlers and chiggers and the coyote's dismal howl. The Black Betty passed freely, until the liquor was all gone, and once, two of our party scouting ahead took a pot shot at an Indian as casually as at a catamount. But this was not an unusual attitude toward red men. It is a fact that one sometimes gets out of Texas, provided he travels long enough, and at last we crossed the Red River over into the Territory of Arkansas. Then one night, when we were near Cantonment Gibson, our friend Yandell vanished from camp. The proximity of American soldiers was too much for him, no doubt. On the hill above Grand River, almost in the shadow of the blue Ozarks, we were welcomed to the outpost of America's wild new empire of the Southwest. The commandant at the time had for guest an eminent 3* story-teller who chose to live in a tent that he might win over the gentle Osages and Cherokees to reveal their legends. "I tell you what, Mr. Irving," Bowie said to him that evening at mess, "you've only come to the edge of your story. Cross ovuh to Texas with us, suh, and we'll promise you a real interesting one befo' so very long." Mr. Washington Irving stirred with professional interest. He rather thought, he said, that the story had already begun, if one might judge of the dashing manner in which the Mexican garrisons had been expelled, and of every martial youth in the States yearning to volunteer for Texas at once. The jovial Mr. Irving was tempted himself, and we of Texas with our big story lost much because he did not come on down to write it for us. At the time, I stood most in awe of him because he had actually talked with the author of "Ivanhoe," and I fretted to ask him lots of questions, but was too diffident to intrude. Bowie and the commandant were at table nearly all night long, so their conversation must have been ab- sorbing. Perhaps they discussed Indians, whom the Mexicans were supposed to be arousing against settlers in Texas, and perhaps the American troops north of the border might influence the redskins south of it to good behaviour. Perhaps they whispered that, though "the folks at Washington were infernally squeamish over appearances," "Old Hickory" himself would not pine away even if some United States soldiers did happen to stray across the Red River. "At any rate, sir," said the commandant to Bowie at the officers' mess next morning, "the man you've come to see probably knows more about what runs in Andy's" stubborn old head on this Texas business than all Washington put together. Ask at any wigwam for 32 THE LONE STAR Co-lon-neh, for that's his Indian name. It means The Raven, and they call him that, account of his black hair. Or," the commandant went on, not so much with a sneer as in genuine compassion, "you might ask for Big Drunk. Fact is, he's sunk so the Indians laugh at him almost as much as they love him. He's one of 'em, too; an out-and-out chief. Mars and little Jumping Jupe, that's nothing, sir. Why, the man's whole career is a surprise box, a regular ammunition chest of off-hand explosions." A bizarre citizen, by all odds, to be so zealously desired of Texas! We rowed across the little river called the Grand, and on the other side we found ourselves among the farms of the Cherokees. At one cabin or another, for this unusual breed of red man no longer lived in wigwams, we were directed by grunts and gestures, and we kept on through fields of maize to a trading post near where the Grand is joined by the Verdigris. "His shack, I reckon," said Bowie. "He runs the agency heah." We picked our way into an atmosphere of salt pork and brown sugar, and Bob Armstrong called for liquor. An Indian girl, tall and supple and she was pretty in a queenly, barbaric way came from an inner room, and shook her head. They did not keep liquor, she said. "None to sell," murmured Bowie, turning to us, "and yet they call him Big Drunk." The girl caught the word, and her dark eyes blazed. "Go, he back there," she said. "Go, he answer you that, hisself." Bowie desired nothing better, and almost too readily he led toward the inner room. "Stop!" she cried. "Why you want him?" Her whole lithe body was appealing. "You f'um Texas, yes? Uh, he talk sad "BIG DRUNK" 33 sometime 'bout down there. You get him go, tell me?" Her bosom filled, and she stiffened rigidly. "Um, yes, mebby better so," she said proudly. "For him, yes. Go, he in there." I believe those tales, now, of tortured Indians who scorn to writhe. We passed into the back room. It was of logs, and low and mean. A heap of blankets lay on the hard earth floor. Jerked meats and peppers hung from the ridge pole. On a tree stump left in the centre of the room for a table was the trough of ka-nau-hee-na, or hominy. But near this greasy trencher lay a book, an old worn book of battered leather. In such a hovel it caught the eye as a locomotive headlight. Who may believe me, this book was the "Iliad!" I could not have been more amazed were it the original, instead of only Pope's translation. There was no one in the cabin, but we kicked away an inquisitive sow sniffing at an open door, and passed on through into a grove of cotton woods. Here, under the nearest tree, we found a man sprawled on the grass, face downward. His was a huge, blanketed figure, and the great flat expanse of his shoulders rose and fell with each heavy drunken breath. He wore moccasins, mud- stained leggings, yellow leather breeches, and a soiled buckskin hunting shirt on a time gaudy with beaded ornaments. His wavy dark hair was braided into an Indian queue, in which, awry or half falling out, were some long eagle feathers. Bowie turned on us in comical dismay. "I am looking," he said, "fo' a gentleman who fought undeh Jackson, who se'ved his country in Congress, who was guv'nor of Tennessee; and I am directed, gentlemen, I am directed to an Indian sot." And with the frank 34 THE LONE STAR smile that so belittled others, he thrust his toe under the man's body and rolled him over on his back. We stood amazed. The man's skin was as white as our own. The bloodshot eyes, opening on us under stern brows, slowly gathered fury, and when he rose, deliberately and majestically for one in his condition, and straightened to his august height, and fastened that gaze upon the man who had dared touch a foot to him, for the life of me I could see none less than a deeply angered Southern gentleman. For all his vagabond attire, I expected from his lips a stately challenge. We looked at first to see him strike, but he clamped down his wrath, and his wrath then grew as cold as death. Yet more than his anger, which made us forget his grotesque dress, more than his vast dignity, which in the dramatic moment overwhelmed a hint of something ponderous and theatrical, more than these was a loneliness in the massive, towering form that smote us as inexpressibly sad. "Yo* pardon, suh," said Bowie heartily, "but I am looking for one whom they call Co-lon-neh." "Well then, sir," the voice was of the deep, bold tone of rolling thunder "and now that you have found him, sir?" "Then you are " "I have said so, suh." "I, uh my name is Bowie, suh." "Bowie?" For the first time the man seemed aware of his mean condition. "Great Jove," his thunderous voice swelled to mighty volume " I am known in Texas then! A vagrant in my own country, but yet I am known in Texas! And they send they send Colonel James Bowie a-h!" "The matter came up, suh," said our leader, "during a convention we held last month at San Felipe de Austin." "BIG DRUNK" 35 "I have heard of that meeting of righteously indig- nant settlers, sir, but," and here the rich voice broke in eagerness, pleading for contradiction, "but I had sup- posed, gentlemen, what with the liberty-loving General Santa Ana striding to honest power over the tyrant's fallen reins, that h'm by God, that your troubles were at an end." Bowie pushed back his hat, ran his hand through the curly red hair, and surveyed the man keenly, in doubt whether this were simplicity or craft. Beside me I heard Deaf Smith mumble his favourite comment, "Words, jes' words!" "We hope so, suh," Bowie replied, "and we do not want for promises, either. But just the same, when we called this little meeting together to ask for a state government of our own you unduhstand that Texas is now a part of the State of Coahuila? why, the Mexicans deplored the whole proceeding as treason, and they're scared of us worse than ever." "Do you mean to tell me, sir," thundered the master- ful barbarian, "that they deny the right of petition? And your answer to that?" "Got him!" said Bob Armstrong in that deep satis- faction having reference, usually, to a dead Indian. "Well," said Bowie, laughing, "perhaps some of us did wonduh, a little bit, where we'd be likely to find a well, you know a commander-in-chief." The magnificent form of our host trembled. The gaudy blanket slipped to the ground, and with it that vile title of "Big Drunk" seemed to fall from him, and he stood before us, the paleface viking emerging from the dissolute Indian chief. But his utter loneliness was there still, and his look of gratitude as he gazed anew at Bowie, then to one and another of the hardy fellows in fringed buckskin, was the hope of a wretch 36 THE LONE STAR being tendered again his squandered birthright of manhood. I remembered that battered copy of the "Iliad," the manual of manhood, beside his swinish trough, and if this drunkard in his gutter could rise again, then why not I, despite my late degradation of soul? I felt his superb strength, and I hoped fervently that he might try, and I would follow, humbly, obscurely, so only in my own heart I should one day know that I had reached the goal. "Now then," said Bowie, "the Commander-in-chief being strictly behind the scenes, we will keep him theah. Besides, if promises are kept, he'll nevuh get his cue. So, to change the subject unduhstand, suh, to change the subject! we've been troubled lately with Indian raids." "By our Indians?" asked Co-lon-neh, still keen for hidden meanings. "Yes, and according to treaty agreement the United States should keep them on this side the bawduh. Accordingly our convention, being aware of your influence over them, was hoping you might consent to visit Texas and induce them to return. President Jackson, I am ceht'n, would be greatly interested in seeing, with your eyes, what uh what you will see in Texas, suh." For a moment Co-lon-neh's penetrating eyes held Bowie's, and his great chest filled deeply. Then, abruptly, he turned from us and began walking up and down under the cottonwood, like a lion scenting freedom. I wondered, more than ever, who the magnificent barbarian could be. "Gentlemen," he stopped, and addressed us solemnly, "gentlemen, mark my words, and mark them well. Sam Houston will some day be the president of a "BIG DRUNK" 37 republic. He will! By 'heaven's eternal doom,' he will! Sam Houston ." We stirred in bewilderment, and he paused, glowing, satisfied with the effect of his words. "Houston?" exclaimed Armstrong, glancing rapidly from Bowie to Deaf Smith. "What's all this here got to do with Governor Houston?" The mysterious stranger flung wide his powerful arms. "Sam Houston, gentlemen," he announced, "stands before you." We stared, and saw a man whose spectacular career was the gossip of the continent. He was the hero of Horse- shoe Bend. In that battle a Creek arrow had pierced his groin, and General Jackson positively ordered him out of the fight. He disobeyed, and charged the Indians single-handed up a narrow gorge. Two bullets riddled his shoulder, and he lay all that night on the wet ground. The surgeons could waste no time on a man so nearly dead. But he was still alive the next morning, and they carried him on a litter sixty miles to an army post, then three hundred miles to his mother's cabin. He was worn to a skeleton, and the doctors would not take his case until he surprised them, as was his habit with all men, by refusing to die. He lived to go to Con- gress, to be elected governor of Tennessee. He married, and two months later vanished from the executive mansion, never clearing the mystery of whatever domes- tic trouble had forced him to it. And here he was, among his old boyhood friends, the Cherokees. He protected them from thieving contractors, from swind- ling politicians, from their own appetites for fiery liquor. But here he was, nearer dead now than at Horse- shoe Bend. It was death morally; the curse of lone- liness and despair, and, to forget the same, the greater curse of drunken sloth. This man before me, not yet 38 THE LONE STAR forty, had won and lost already more than I could ever hope to win during my whole life. But in his struggle to begin anew there was for me an inspiration I had never found in books. "Yes, gentlemen," he was saying in his exaltation, "Drunken Sam attaints the lustre of a former name, and Drunken Sam remains behind. But Sam Houston, gentlemen, Sam Houston will go with you to Texas." CHAPTER IV "G. T. T." WE REMAINED at Fort Gibson several weeks longer. Our notable recruit, Governor Houston, had to send an express to the "War Department at Washington. His message concerned more intimately President Jackson himself. Years before Andrew Jackson had been the curbstone champion of Aaron Burr, at the time when Aaron Burr was being tried for designs on the very region to which we were now taking Andrew Jackson's friend. We easily passed the time at the rude wooden bar- racks among our new trencher-mates, or in hunting and fishing with an Osage for guide. Mr. Irving's jovial laugh was a treat to be sought, and I had chances in plenty for private details about "Ivanhoe," but "Ivanhoe's" importance had somehow dwindled. He was only the Crusader of a book, after all, and he shrank to picayunish proportions beside the real and living one we had enlisted. This chief in gaudy red blanket, by "fate resistless from his country led," as he himself quoted, was not averse to youngsters, and when he distinguished me, as he did the others, with a warm hand clasp, the smile on his big splendid mouth was like the conferring of a title of nobility. I knew Sam Houston for his kind heart then, and his courtly dignity was no longer a bar to fellowship. "Why, great Jove, and let him blast me," he exclaimed, his voice softening to a whimsical Tennessee 39 40 THE LONE STAR drawl, "if it wasn't your father, my boy, that I met years ago on the identical first steamboat to go down the Miss'ippi. I had to get this shoulder sewed up a little tighter at New Orleans, while your daddy was going to the same place to be governor of Louisiana. Though," he added, winking gravely, "I don't recollect the young rascal mentioning any such purpose at the time. Do you reckon, now, it was because he didn't know it himself?" Houston's stupor and melancholy were gone. His one relapse into gloom was when he parted with Tyania, the stately Indian girl who was his tribal wife. She was the Stoic as ever. When we rode away, and he turned to look back on his humble clearing, and gazed long at the hut under the cottonwoods, she gave no sigh, but leaned composedly in the doorway, seemingly without interest. Her departing brave knew better, though. But he knew too, perhaps even then, that when he should send for her later, she would not come, lest she hinder his rise again among his own people. We travelled due south through an unbroken forest of pine and hickory, or through oak-timbered bottoms. Only twice between Jonesboro and the neighbourhood of Nacogdoches did we see a white man's habitation. One was the wickiup of a lone hunter, the other a trap- per's clearing in the Red Lands. The hide-clad children of the latter stared at us as at a rare species of nomad, and even for his raw-boned wife we were hardly a memory. Their knowledge of the red brother, though, was infinite. Rifle slits between the logs attested to that. The brats of toddling age could each make a notch for a first Indian slain. Beside our campfire the grizzly lord of the manor fondly recounted these exploits of babes as another father might gloat over a little one's first babbling words. We had here a glimmer of "G. T. T." 41 understanding why Texas was the American's heritage, the American's only. That log cabin held the future of the wilderness, had there been a prophet among us to read the signs. But now for a poignant encounter of my own! We were traversing the Neutral Ground, the old desperado paradise of the Spaniard's day. I had craved the sen- sation of knowing that I was actually 'mid the scenes of the fearsome tales that had crowded my boyhood. So when we crossed the Red River at Fort Towson, I told myself that from here on to the Sabine lay the neutral zone about which our country and Spain had agreed to disagree, since neither could fix the boundary according to the ideas of the other. Here, then, in dark forests and swampy bottoms where no law prevailed, bands of red- handed prowlers used to enact awesome tableaux to the shuddering delight of every nursery in Civilisation. There were thickets for ambuscades, and dark ravines for murder, and hollow oaks, vine-covered and mossy, for plunder. Easily enough I identified the setting for crimson melodrama. Over on the Arkansas side the woods were as dense, the gloom as impenetrable, but on this side fancy deepened every tone, and here in this haunted forest I would not have bartered one moan of the ghostly whip-poor-will for the most lugubrious wolf howl north of the Red River. Our merry company, and the Black Betty going from lip to lip, would have shattered these illusions, so it happened that I was riding on ahead beyond the echoes of their laughter. Bowie had warned me that I stood a fair shake of being potted from ambush by any lone Indian, but the danger, being unseen, merely added piquancy to my imaginings. I practised an alert eye, and feasted on the thrill of testing each bush. Then a sharp cracking of twigs just ahead lifted me 42 THE LONE STAR out of my reverie and saddle both. A man scrambled to his feet from a spicewood thicket beside the trail, and Lush Yandell himself cocked his head up at me in that brutish leer that I hated so. Here, in the flesh, rank, coarse, ill-smelling flesh, was a hero of my Neutral Ground, but the uncouth ruffian miserably belied the glamour of it all. I had always shrunk from the man in disgust, though not meaning to, since the others thought my irritation great fun. But it was an aversion I could not help. He rasped on everything there was in me, and I loathed him from head to foot. The heavy insolence in his eyes to the very way he wrapped rawhide thongs around his ankles above his moccasins, was ex- asperating beyond measure. He was puffy, loutish, unclean. The greasy black hair on him covered the back of his hands to the finger nails. It stuck like bristles from ears and nostrils. It extended raggedly to his cheek bones, but on one side higher than on the other, which gave his face the vile, misshapen look of some impossible beast. I know that this is not very charitable, and you must not decide that there was no good in Lush Yandell, since there is some in all men. But the fact is, that an antipathy has always been a very virulent affair with me, though happily rare, and if these recollections are to have the one virtue of honesty, then the antipathies must stalk through them as inevitably as Banquo's wraith at the feast. Yandell had divined these feelings that I could not hide, and I believe it was his pleasure to rouse them into a kind of smothered torture. You would suspect as much now, to see him fill his old red-clay pipe from the wallet contributed by the dead Indian; also from the way he twisted his lop-sided head to make sure of my repugnance. "Huh, our little compadrecito , ef 'tain't!" he began,- "G. T. T." 43 and to my alarm he mounted his horse, which he had held by the bridle as he waited among the bushes, and crowded me half off the trail to ride beside me. "Brung Drunken Sam along too, eh?" he went on, cutting my horse with his quirt, and blowing a mouthful of foul smoke across my face. "Yes, I knowed it afore you'd been at Fort Gibson two days." "Then where were youf" I asked. He glowered as at a taunt, and I recalled Bowie's theory concerning his reluctance about being seen in the States. Like most heroes of the Neutral Ground, he was very likely one of those cynical fugitives who scrawled "G. T. T." "Gone to Texas" on their doors before disappearing. "Where?" he repeated, not without a swaggering triumph. "I followed you, that's where. Then I tortled on back to San 'tone, an' then this way ag'in. till last night I come on your campfire." His meaning was quite plain. He had informed the Mexican authorities at San Antonio of our errand, and they had sent him back to meet us. But why, I asked him, had he not made himself known the night before ? "Because," he said, laying a menacing stress on each word, "I 'lowed for to talk with jus' one of you alone fust, and skin me if you won't do, mirac'lous." His tone made me nervous. This was to be worse than bullying. " 'Tain't no manner of use," he proceeded jovially. "/ cain't help bein' curious, an' here I be, a-guessin' my inerds out, ez to what Sam Houston means by it. Now then, my gander-shanked bantling, does it so happen thet you know?" I tried to tell him that he might ask Governor Houston himself. "What's that?" he demanded as though he had not 44 THE LONE STAR heard me. "So, and this low-down squaw man means for to stir up the revolutioners, ye say?" I stammered angrily, yet trembled with foreboding. I felt that I was being drawn already into the vortex of seething events. Yandell jerked back his horse until I was fairly along- side, where he could have me under his hairy fist. "Mebbe," he said, his tone changing to a growl and a threat, "jus' mebbe now ye'll be after sayin', now ur later, thet 'tain't so?" He meant to frighten me into becoming his tool, but while my conception of a stinging reply was brave enough, yet the brave words would not come. "My gran'mam for a pussy cat," he laughed viciously, "ef ye ain't wheezin' like a sick steamboat! Bulldog stock, eh? Guv'ner Gen'ral Jedge Ripley yuh pa, eh? Oh, you poor little milk-livered pink-face, an' do ye want to know what ails you? Well, ye've been licked in your fust fight, thet's what, an' no pup ain't ever any good after that. But my hide in hell for a middlin' o' bacon! you are goin' to be useful! Useful to me, mirac'lous useful, useful ez " But digging his spurs heartlessly, he was gone, and soon after disappeared ahead in the narrowing of the forest path. He left me burning inside like a tar-kiln, as Davy Crockett would say, and I smarted all over. It was not alone his gloating assumption that he could exploit my broken spirit for his own uses, but also my feeling that there should have been retaliation before he got away. Yet what retaliation was there? I could not thrash him. And to draw a pistol with any luck to myself would have meant killing him, but, thank Heaven, I wanted no human life as a balm to pride. So I tried to laugh at my chagrin. After all, it was more comical than otherwise, and the boorish Yandell was too. "G. T. T." 45 Also I had an inkling deep down in me of a superiority over his bullying, fat-witted vanity. But still, I had not demonstrated it, and in that lay the smart. I slackened pace until the others came up, and told them of Yandell's spying. But the trouble obviously preparing ahead only amused them. No one even suggested a change of route. The old rerkless daring mocked the future in Bowie's gray eyes. "I don't reckon," he laughed, glancing af Houston's magnificent blanketed figure, "that we can keep him a secret, nohow." So the little riffle flattened to the placid surface of things, as did also any inflation I may have had over the momentous significance of my news. Inflation is a dream hard to sustain, in Texas. CHAPTER V A REDLANDER GIRL WE LEFT the timber bottoms and piney hills behind us, and came at last upon a rolling and more open country. Here were the Red Lands, and luxurious they were and beyond any I had ever seen, even in Louisiana. We now skirted the Texas edge of the Neutral Ground, and were approaching Nacogdoches, the first outpost on the twenty-league strip of deadline. It was an outpost, too, of every adventure heroic or incarnadine. Next to Bexar or San Antonio, as we now call the place Nacogdoches was the only discern- ible town in the Texas of Spanish days. While Amer- icans were yet pummelling England for freedom, a colony from Louisiana gave Nacogdoches her being, and since then every blow for the winning of Texas had gathered its force in Louisiana or Mississippi, and from Nacog- doches, or on Nacogdoches, the blow always fell first. The Spaniards would raze the town, but in vain, for back across the Neutral Ground the Americans came again, inevitably. And these Americans would declare Mexico independent against Spain, or themselves so against either. They seemed a different breed, the Redlanders, from the colonists who more recently had followed Stephen Austin. Mr. Austin's settlers counted on Mexican good faith, and meant to be loyal Mexicans. But the heritage of the Redlanders was turbulence. And many settlers, passing through to join Austin, breathed the Red Land 46 A REDLANDER GIRL 47 air, and aspired to the heritage, and stayed on as Red- landers ever after. And now we had in convoy the noblest Redlander of them all. For Sam Houston may be reckoned as just that ere he had ever set foot in Texas. The day after my encounter with Lush Yandell we came among the settlements. I remember the first emblem of Civilisation. Hardier than the planted flag, sturdier for conquest than garrisoned legions, there it was, clinging to the land in homely, tenacious grip, an ugly, old, zig-zag, worm fence. After the wilderness it was a thing of beauty and a joy to the eye. In the field on the other side a man was ploughing, though the month was December. And when he waved his hand to us and roared out, "Howdy, strangers! " we knew that he was an American. The clearing was part of a large plantation, if I may use our Louisiana word to describe several thousand acres where cattle grazed and swine roamed almost wild in groves of oak and pecan, with here and there a patch of corn or cotton. Later in the afternoon we saw a thin column of smoke over the tree tops, and knew that we were near the ranch house. "Hope we'll catch Old Man Buckalew at home," said Bowie to Houston. "He's alcalde mayor, you know of Nacogdoches, and we're on his place now. For a compend of Texian high jinks, suh, Mr. Buckalew is ceht'nly yo' man, and I want you to meet him." The ranch house, which stood off the road under the trees, was a species of overgrown and generously overfed log cabin. At every angle it bulged out in ells and lean-to's. A covered gallery wide enough for a stage coach ran through the middle from front to back. An enormous red brick chimney formed most of the wall on one side, and the smoke we had seen curled lazily 48 THE LONE STAR from its sooty muzzle, and was wafted over the roofs like a benediction. It was a very solid personality, this red brick pile of chimney. The rest of the house seemed an extension only, and hung upon it fondly, comfortably dispensing with responsibility, as peasant huts cluster about a cathedral tower and are snugly assured of the hope of heaven. There was a detached kitchen, and a smokehouse outlying. In the distance were cowsheds and barns; and to one side, a stone fence corral, where giddy colts thrust noses at us with inquisitive neighings. All of this was not much in the way of being imposing, but I understood later, from my own trials, what an aristoc- racy of effort and sacrifice the humble home meant in that region where a plough was a rarity and every rail split an event. Debonair French, haughty Spaniards, stolid Mexicans, each had tried it already. But no matter, they were not of the aristocracy. As we turned off the road toward the house, with a multitude of fox-hounds scampering around us in wel- come, we perceived a curious assemblage on what might be called Mr. Buckalew's lawn. Human beings were of themselves an odd sight for us lately, and these num- bered fifty or more. They were white and red and tawny, and some were black and slaves to the three other colours. We galloped forward to join this cos- mopolis of the backwoods. Americans, Indians, Mex- icans, and Negroes, they were having a cock-fight. Men in coonskin caps, men in sombreros, blanketed men, women in rebosas, in beads and fringed deer-hide, some with babes wrapped to their breasts, children hopping about in almost nothing at all, dogs sniffing, or yelping when kicked, roosters crowing yes, it was a community of interest. It was a cock-fight. Outside the roped-in circle they moved around or they waited stolidly. Birds were matched, with argument, with A REDLANDER GIRL 49 gesture. Purses were made up, with pennies, with measures of corn, with bear robes. Wagers were offered, or taken, or refused, with shrugs, with grunts. There was more decorum than at a stock exchange. A rooster strained against his cord for a preliminary peck at a feathered neighbour. We drew rein, and were at once absorbed. It was a community of interest. The business was well forward, and even the advent of strangers got only casual glances. A crusty old fellow with shaggy, iron-gray moustache and tortoise- shell spectacles was fairly pulling Bowie off his horse, and ordering the rest of us to the ground. I had drawn a little apart, and could watch undisturbed; but it was not for the cock-fight. It was for a girl. She was a slim, exasperatingly independent, and graceful little creature of a girl in short leather skirt much too young, of course, for real interest, except that I wondered what kind of a girl it could be who was tying the gaff on a gamecock. Her back was turned, and a strapping, docile young fellow was holding the bird for her. She seemed very deft about it, as she fitted the weapon to the fowl's blunted spur and wound the thong around its hock. The gaff was fully three-inches long, and curved like a scythe. It was as slender as the thorn called the Spanish dagger, and had an edge like a razor. This murderous finesse was truly Mexican, I thought, and, of course, the girl must be Mexican too. At any rate she was an unfamiliar species of girl. It was hard enough to connect the sex with rooster fights, but still, in the matter of girls, when there are certain disconcerting tendril effects on the nape of the neck, I'm afraid that I always was hopelessly susceptible. Now, Rosalie, for instance, and yes, and others. But this girl's hair was black, or at least with only a fugitive glint of deep bronze, and it was very lustrous, and S o THE LONE STAR the tendrils did not have that clinging quality the word implies. They were aggressive little tresses on their own account, and as her collar was turned in, they waved over a neck of russet tan. There was quaint self-reliance in each thing she did, and high mettle showed in the very poise of her girlish figure. I could not help a vague sense of uneasiness even though her back was turned. I dreaded already any April storm of fury, because then she might take it into her head to stamp her foot. She resigned her plumed champion to the strapping, docile young fellow at last, who slipped a leather sheath over the gaff, and performed such manoeuvres as blowing into the rooster's beak, or pulling his toes until the knuckles cracked, or holding him out to peck his adver- sary, so that there might be no question of love and affection between the two gladiators later on. The girl looked around now to see who the newcomers were, and to my disappointment she was not Mexican at all. She was American, from the toe of her boot to the resolute tilt of her sombrero. There were roses in the tan of her cheeks, and high up on her brow, at the roots of her hair, the skin was purest white. I say that I was disappointed, because, never having known any Mexican girls, I was prepared to be mightily inter- ested in one of them officiating at a cock main. But when the r61e was shifted to a girl of my own race well, all the glamour faded out. Besides, she was only about sixteen. However, there's one thing I like to believe of those half-baked days of my youth; which is, that at least I was not a prig. Still, to see an American girl tying on that deadly gaff wrought a twinge in my underdone scheme for the universe, a scheme that combined austere New England with Louisiana's soft sense for beauty , The A REDLANDER GIRL 51 scheme was not in the least adjusted as yet to such racy unconventionalisms as. Texas. But whether approbation did not glow on my countenance, or there was a hint of the touring stranger's detached curiosity, I'm sure I don't know, but I do know that high-spirited retort flashed in those eyes of hers as they met mine. I saw nothing of angry crimson under the soft tan and possibly seven freckles, although I have been given to under- stand since then that her cheeks were on fire. However, she coldly looked me over for the space of a second, making me feel uncomfortable in my velvet-faced manga and Hessian boots and all the rest of that overpowering Indian-killer outfit as contrived by New Orleans fur- nishers. Her lips pursed up lips that no stain from artificial roses could have made redder and she went on to mark with the toe of her boot the starting lines for the two gamecocks. A grande dame could not have done it better ; that is to say, the mental dismissal of my- self. With the grande dame it would have been art. With her it was the unconscious arrogance of some woodland creature. Never, not even in the settlements, have I met so wild a girl as was this little black-eyed Redlander. The cock-fight was nothing like our long drawn-out mains at home. When released, each on his line, the two birds crouched and leaped. One, the girl's cham- pion, went over the other, and in mid-air kicked his armed spur backward. The blow could no more be seen than the stab of the needle in a sewing machine, but when the cock alighted, his gaff was thinly red. The second bird leaped again, and thrust. But he floundered against his adversary, and sank to the ground, his eyes closing, the feathers on his breast wet and soggy. The first cock was therefore victor, but suddenly his neck crumpled forward, and the docile young farmer grabbed him up and laid him on the grass outside the 5 2 THE LONE STAR ring, where he collapsed and expired before his victim did. He had been struck in the head. Both were kicked aside as useless rubbish, and Americans, Mexicans, Indians, and Negroes moved around collecting winnings from the stakeholders. Affairs seemed to be quick and decisive and deadly in this new country. The matter- of-fact phase of killing gave me a pang. There should be more-to-do over it. For once I leaned to books and imagination by preference. "Oh Nan! Nan, come here!" It was the crusty old fellow of the tortoise-shell spectacles who called. "Now," he demanded, and he appeared very severe about it, " where's the little catamou't now? " The little catamount's hand had been filled with coppers won on her champion, and she was flinging them about among the pickaninnies and Mexican youngsters. She went on placidly, and paid no heed to the call. But the imperious old gentleman did not take the high hand with her that his manner led us to expect. Apparently he forgot all about her the next minute. "I don't reckon now," he said plaintively, suspecting a grievance in advance, "that any of you all thought to bring along a couple of churchwardens?" He looked inquiringly from Bowie to Houston, to Deaf Smith, to Armstrong, to the others, but never a churchwarden did he see. His wants were so pious and unusual that curiosity drew me nearer. "Of coh'se," he said, "you didn't get further'n Arkansas, and I take it churchwardens are considerable scarce in those parts. But whatdo you think, gentlemen," he added with a sigh, " this here's my very last one." He meant the delicate, gracefully curved, long- stemmed pipe that he held up for reverence. With his finger he tenderly pressed the tobacco in the A REDLANDER GIRL 53 coloured bowl, and dismissed his gloom in a soothing whiff. "Oh, Nan," he called again, abruptly remembering. "Here, Nan, girl, that ought to do 'em for to-day. Ain't no sense fighting 'em faster'n they can hatch, no- how." His nose had a pugnacious tilt, and you would have taken oath that he yearned for nothing so much as contradiction, yet for all his bossy manner, there was grave affection in the mild eyes behind the tortoise- shell spectacles. "Now Nan," he went on, as though it were a good thing for her that she chose to heed his mandates at last, "here, you get Zeb to take the horses of these gentlemen and bed 'em snug. And Nan, you're the identical girl to see that we get proper fixings for supper. But first off, we'll want a sherry cobbler. Here, Nan Swear myself thunder black (which he never did), and give you salt and vinegar topped off with lightning too, and still you wouldn't stand unhitched! Here, I want you to know our visitors. Know Colonel Bowie already, of coh'se, and most of the rest, but here's Governor Houston. My daughter, sir, Nan Buckalew." The girl's hand went out impulsively. Her pleasure was evident. I wondered how it must feel to have people's eyes open that way at mention of your name. But our great man in this instance, with his Indian's blanket, his queue done up on the back of his head, his beaded moccasins, and his white hunting shirt, chose to pay honours, not to receive them. His chivalry was stately ; it was Southern. He doffed his mammoth beaver, and bent over the little sun-kissed hand as gallantly as if his attire were doublet and hose and a jaunty sword. "And this young man" the old fellow's hospitality was scrupulously impartial "I don't reckon " 54 THE LONE STAR "Why," said Bowie, presenting me as I slid from my horse, "this is Harry Ripley. You know, Buck, Judge Ripley'sboy?" Again, and to my great amazement, the light of pleasure shone in the girl's eyes. I had to believe, moreover, that she had not really noticed me before, even though she had pursed her lips. Faith, I was centuries younger that moment than this same little miss in short skirts! "Why, why, why!" she exclaimed in a voice of the clearest quality, "why!" she exclaimed again, shaking my hand, "if it wasn't your father then who helped Daddy and General Long and Colonel Bowie and all of them, the time the Spaniards chased us them, I mean, as I wasn't born just then chased them out of Texas, and General Long paddled all the way from Galveston Island clear to New Awlins in just a pirogue to get more men to fight them the Spaniards with ; and if it wasn't for Judge Ripley he couldn't have got them. Oh, I know all about it, even if I wasn't born yet, and I'm certainly mighty glad to meet you uh, Mr. Ripley." The girl that she was! And the sweet, clear, bell-like voice, soft in our Southern accent, tinkling away! Heavens, she didn't talk half enough! And twice as much would still not have been half enough. But she did stop at last, and looked me frankly in the eyes, and smiled, quite out of breath. It warmed my heart to hear my father spoken of like this, and yet I was not content. There is the word hidalgo, formed from hi jo de algo, which means the son of someone, and I didn't want to be an hidalgo. I wanted to be myself, and I did not want to be described in terms of parentage. Governor Houston, for instance, could claim a Revolutionary sire, yet no one ever thought to mention it. Nan Buckalew did not. He was him- self; that's the point. And so I was not altogether A REDLANDER GIRL 55 happy because the girl's pleased look went over my head and on up into the family tree. Then, as ironical fate would have it, the chance was given to show myself as my own self. And, what was worse, I did. We were just having a cobbler, crowned to Bacchus in a grand manner by Governor Houston, when who should come galloping down on us but Lush Yandell himself. The precious long-stemmed clay trembled in Buckalew's hand. For all Buckalew's serio- comic, half surly bulldog way, at bottom he hated to be roused, but it was easy to see that Lush Yandell was not welcome at Buckalew's. The disposition for hos- tilities was much readier in the eyes of his daughter Nan. The old man drew near her, quite as a mother would draw near a big hot-tempered son. The little black derringer she wore nearly hidden at her girdle could not be for ornament. Yandell did not dismount. " His lordship," he began at once, "which is the Jefe at San' tone, wants thet I should see his passports." "Passports?" said Buckalew. "Whose passports, suh?" "His'n, Sam Houston's. Look-ee here!" Malevo- lently he flaunted a document out of his tobacco pouch. "It's from his lordship. It's got his seal an' his fist, an' Dios y Libertad for pig-tight, an' it's for to signify thet Sefior Yandell is a deppity-secret service. An' ez such," the deputy secret-made proclamation, "I here- before hereby call on you, Sefior Buckalew, alcalde." The old man peered up through the tortoise-shell spectacles. "On me, Lush?" "Certin sure! Ain't ye the alcalde o' Nacogdoches, I want to know? So it's passports from Sam Houston, ur git, afore they's a greasin' o' bullet patches in Texas." Houston appreciated our host's quandary, and started S 6 THE LONE STAR to interrupt, but Bowie, who knew the old man so well, pinched Houston's arm for silence. "C'rect, Lush," Buckalew was saying, "though, as Goliah mentioned about the fling-stone, that's some- thing that never entered my head before. But you see now, we ain't in Nacogdoches, and anywheres else I'm not alcalde." "Ye 're boss on your own ranch, I reckin." "As you've maybe noticed before now, Lush Yandell. But p'raps you're feeling keen for a second seeing of the light. Or if you're not" here the old man paused to surrender the churchwarden to Bowie, fearing lest he break it in his growing agitation "if not, then you have just one identical minute to explain what you mean, suh, by coming here and annoying my guests. One minute, suh! Quic,k, half of it's up whilst I'm a- talking to you." "It's along o' this here Drunken Sam," said Yandell hastily, "meaning for to stir up revolutioners." "Stop!" The command was like a thunderclap, and startled us all. Sam Houston himself had taken a hand. His face purpled, invective crowded his tongue, and in his towering presence none might suspect aught of the theatrical. "Stop right where you are, you dog," he roared, "and prove your contemptible assertion!" Yandell tried pitiably to sneer. "It's our milk-livered papoose here," he said. "It's him thet blabbed. I skeered him to it, skeered him so's he thought I was fur rippin' his inerds out an' skelpin' him alive. An' what he said, Guv'ner Houston, was this here. He said thet ye 're a organiser o' rebelly-on. Them's his very school-book words. Ask him. Ur mebbe he'll be sayin' now 'tain't so, jus' mebbe now." I felt the threat in that last. His horse was almost A REDLANDER GIRL 57 tramping on me, and I was again under his hairy fist. But he had oddly miscalculated. To brand myself a cur and informer in that company, with those eyes on me, Bowie's, Houston's, Deaf Smith's, and a pair of snapping hazel-black ones, this was to require infinitely more courage than braving a vague death sentence from Lush Yandell. "You you're a liar!" I had forced the words, though queerly enough they sounded in my own ears, and then I crouched involun- tarily, fully expecting his knife between my shoulders. But he laughed. He did not even resent the insult. I had made too much of it, and perhaps it did sound rather like the petulance of a child. "Oh, oh," he jeered, "ain't he riled though! O wake snakes and hump, ain't he riled! But ye see, he ez good ez owns up.' "Words," grunted Deaf Smith, "jes' words!" That anchored the lie definitely, and I was believed, Until then the taciturn old scout had left me to face the test alone. He knew that I needed the schooling. But now I saw that his pistol was levelled from his hip. My life had been safe enough. Sam Houston, meantime, had fumed in lordly im- patience. But he was not to be kept longer out of the limelight. "You dam' rascal," he burst forth, "get off that horse! Get off, I say," and Yandell obeyed. "Now then, open that paper you have there and show what authority it gives you to make the lying assertion just crammed down your throat. Not any, eh? Now by the Eternal, you exceeded your authority. Turn round, and throw up your hands ! Turn round, you whelp ! " The wild blood in the man was up. His bellowed commands were near an Indian's warwhoop. Yandell, 5 8 THE LONE STAR more dazed than actually cringing, started to do as he was told, when Houston snatched his quirt from him and brought it down across his shoulders. The bully howled once, and wheeled round to fire. But the lash caught his pistol, and sent it spinning in the air. The next blow But Bowie's hand closed over the whip. "What do you mean, sir?" cried Houston. "Why suh," said Bowie, his daredevil eyes sparkling, "it it's Yandell's quirt, you know, not yours/' Houston's furious expression was first poised in amazement. Then it relaxed little by little, and then broke suddenly into a great uproarious laugh. After all, our histrionic personage had that grace that saved him. Though but a grain, his sense of humour meant the hope of practical things under his lofty dignity. His unbridled indignation was spectacular and particularly satisfying, yet you will say it lacked the calm reserve force of the truly big man. Quite so, but I suspected afterward that in the very height of his passionate out- break he was calculating its effect. The masterful reserve was behind, all right, and a beautiful arrange- ment it was too, since he could vent his hot Scotch-Irish at the same time. "Thank you, Colonel Bowie, thank you," he roared in his laughter. "Mighty Jove, perhaps Mr. Yandell did not want to lend me his property! Here, take it back, but don't forget, I can borrow one from somebody else next time. Let me beg you not to forget, sir." "Gawd," snarled the desperado, " 'tain't likely! An' they's not one of ye I'll furget, nuther. Oh, I'll cut yuh combs, I'm etern'ly skewered ef I don't. You, old man," and he turned on Buckalew as safer than the terrible white Indian from Tennessee, "I'll be shet of ye yit. An' you," he turned on me as the safest of all, 59 "you're the licked pup thet's allus licked, an' you're goin' to come in useful, mirac'lous useful." "But meantime, Lush," Bowie interposed, "I suppose you are returning to San Antone?" Lush growled an affirmative. "Good," said Houston, "for you may advise his lordship that Sam Houston will do himself the honour to pay his respects. Sam Houston comes as the emissary of the United States of America, duly provided with a passport from the Secretary of War of the same great power. He comes to induce certain Indian bands to return to the United States, and as this involves a treaty obligation, his lordship will doubtless extend to the emissary every aid. With which, sir, you have Sam Houston's permission to take yourself out of his sight, to his lordship, sir, or to the devil, sir." Yandell was sufficiently adept by now to feel the brew- ing of the tempest. Scowling as ever, with the per- spiration like beads of grease on his hairy face, he dragged at his horse's bridle until he gained the road, and mounted. Then there was a clear, bell-like voice among us. "Daddy, here's another cobbler, and supper's all ready." CHAPTER VI SANTA ANA, HERO TO DESCRIBE Old Man Buckalew as a compend of Texian high jinks was not exaggeration. At supper that evening he beamed up and down the spacious board, and had hard work remembering to be crusty. Even when he did, the negroes coming and going with laden wooden trenchers or pewter platters only grinned at the fraud of it. As an implement for punctuating remarks his churchwarden was replaced by his long hunting knife, which he used for carving the juicily browned 'possum in front of him. The dry fun in his eyes was as crisp as frost, and behind the shell-rimmed specs the eyes might have belonged to some mischievous gamin peeking through a knothole in a fence. The old man he wasn't really old, either revealed himself as a sorry humbug altogether, that evening. He a crabbed porcupine? God bless him, he was the jolliest there. He had reason, too, for did he not have several of his ancient cronies around him, right under his heel, where he could berate them to as neat a turn as the bear steak itself? Truly he had them, as truly as he had had the bear, a plump, belated old bear getting in rather too late to his winter home. Then, among his guests, there was the stranger in Texas. There was Sam Houston, and Sam Houston was all ears. The eminent stranger, ready always with his " Iliad," had apostrophised the tempting spread, but he had invoked discourse too, " the medicine of the mind." So naturally the compend of Texian high jinks was having a high old time of it. 60 SANTA ANA, HERO 61 We heard a great deal of General Long, for instance. General Long went particularly well with the flour bread, neither being a usual institution. General Long had hidden bullets and powder in a dry well on that very ranch, once when the Gachupins Spaniards were driving him back into the Neutral Ground. But General Long had made the Gachupins sorry afterwards. Old Man Buckalew had campaigned with General Long. And so, bless us, had Deaf Smith. And so had Bowie. And so had one other, not there present. The name of him not there present was Ben Milam. And so we had a great deal of Ben Milam too, along with General Long and hot biscuits and 'possum gravy. The candles in their tin sconces on the board walls twinkled as merrily as stars. There was laughter, and clattering of dishes, and everybody eager to talk at once, while half of them did talk, and there was good cheer not to be surpassed. Yet as we bent over our plates, or at our host's autocratic ukase sent them back, either to him at one end, or to Nan at the other, for "more of the same, with some of those yams in their own juice, thank you," we fought over again the battles of early Texas, and they were dark and troublous times, indeed, that we passed through so gaily. For me many a vague idealisation got itself trampled on that night, and the warm flesh of realism laid over a phosphorescent skeleton put that skeleton out of recognition. But if one's notions are never to be mussed up and readjusted, why live longer? There would then be nothing new. No one wants his existence a squeezed lemon. Now and again the eager light flamed in Houston's eyes as he listened, and his massive chest would swell, as though he were bracing himself to huge endeavour. I began to feel oddly that this chat in a log cabin was freighted with the issue of empire. There was a gravity 62 THE LONE STAR in the questions that Houston put. The questions were the groping of a statesman for the whip hand. They marked the tortuous craft of an astute Indian chief. Out of the Past he was stalking the Future. The chaos of events yet to happen was slowly coalescing. The things I heard that night were as the bone and sinew of every white man and woman in all the lone cabins scattered over the quarter million square miles of Texas. As bone and sinew they were the Idea, the Religion, fanatical with some, unsuspected by most, that pointed to the quarter million square miles as one day American, American inevitably. One had only to hear Nan Buckalew, as she lifted her chin from her hand, and her thoughts likewise, and said, "But it's ours! Didn't we buy it once?" She meant our old tenuous claim, when Texas was part of the Louisiana Purchase, or said to be. But we had abandoned the contention when Spain ceded Florida to us. "Florida for Texas, oh, oh!" Nan's indignation was good to see, but such positive opinions in such a little girl made me restive. The December night blew cold, but the roaring that awaited us in the cavernous fireplace was a young con- flagration. Here we gathered after the feast, and here the feast of soul went on, and none the less cosily, either, for one more guest, who was hoary old Boreas himself up in the chimney. The fragrant tobacco fumes must have drawn him there, to judge from the many whiffs he snuffed up his gusty lungs. Luxurious rugs strewed the floor, and in the deep fur of bear and goat and buffalo we made ourselves snug around the generous hearth, preferring this comfort, many of us, to the hide-bottom chairs or rough hewn stools, and pledged ourselves to Texas in little wooden noggins of peach and honey. SANTA ANA, HERO 63 It was then that we hectored Buckalew, despite his querulous oath to the contrary, into telling us a certain story. The story was one that Bowie knew him to have packed in his memory about this man Santa Ana who was just then the latest dominant idol of all the Mexicans. While yet at supper we had seen General Long and his few hundred Americans through to the end, to that end when Long was acclaimed in the Mexican capital as another Lafayette and then assassinated by the Mexicans he had helped to free. After that we had plodded along valorously into recent history, when Mexican welcome had changed to attempted subjuga- tion, and woes and wrongs clouded the sun like a locust plague. Thus we came at last to the latest dominant idol, who was the hope of American settlers as well as of all the Mexicans. "Then," said Houston tentatively," this Santa Ana is sincere?" " Oh, don't look at me," said Bowie. " Sant' Ana stood at my wedding. Ask Buck." "And," growled Buckalew, "he's a bigger humbug than than an ole Ben Davis apple." "Go on now, go on," prompted Bowie. "It's a good story." The old man frowned, a genuine frown, too; and swore he would never tell that story again. And how I wished later that he had not! But we all insisted. Governor Houston should hear it, said Bowie, to judge for himself of Santa Ana as the hope of Texas. Bucka- lew got down his churchwarden from its sacred nail on the wall, and settled himself by the crackling blaze of logs. "This here Sant' Ana," he began, pointing each deliverance at us with the long clay, "this here Napoleon of the West, as he calls himself, is the identical capstone 64 THE LONE STAR of patriotism, yes. Gentlemen, he stands to his rack, corn o' no corn." Buckalew really said "cawn," for he was a Mississip- pian, though his native accent had been considerably roughened by many years in Texas. But I want to explain that just here I am beginning to rebel against changing the orthography of our common language merely to let Northerners know that a Southerner is speaking it. Why, indeed, should I make Northern ears the standard? Or worse, why not the Englishman's? and Lord knows his accent looks outlandish enough when indicated phonetically! As for us of the South, I never suspected that we jumped our "r's," blithely as over a gentle gap, until schoolmates back East laughed at my pronunciation as being so quaint, but when I came to notice the difference myself, I certainly was glad of it. I even like to indicate the difference by the written word, but then only as an occasional reminder, and in those instances where the accent is especially soft. Yet as for treating my own speech so, that is out of the question, because one's speech, to one's own ears, is always exactly the criterion. "Yes," Old Man Buckalew went on, "your Sant' Ana is as faithful, gentlemen, as as a Comanche treaty. Hunt over all teetotal Hades yes, and even Mexico and you'll not find another man that can be faithful to so many diff'rent contrary-wise things in such dizzy quick order. First off he stuck to the Gachupins like a mustard plaster on a sore boil. Fought his own people, the Mex'cans. Fought these same liberties he's so ticklish about lately. Then look, sir," and he pointed the long clay at Houston as though it were a schoolmaster's wand, "how when independence could be hit off com- fortable and safe he flopped and nobly risked his life . Here, Nan, rouster up a nigguh. Swear myself thunder SANTA ANA, HERO 65 black, one would think the way you keep spinning that wheel we weren't going to have a stitch to our backs by morning! Here now, we want some pecans and apple- jack Yes sir, he 'pronounced' like a bull for the downtrodden rights of the people, fodder o' no fodder. I never saw such a man. He's livelier 'n limburger in the dog-days." "You are, you mean," said Bowie. "How much longer are you going to twist round this story like an eel in the frying pan?" The old man peered up at the chimney as the wind roared a blast. "Good thing it's a dry one, this norther," he said. "But who'd 'ave thought at noon that " "The story, the story!" cried everybody. "Come now, buckle to it!" "It happened," said Bowie, mildly but firmly giving him his cue, "at the battle on the Medina, near on twenty years ago " "The time," proceeded the old man, squirming, "when Sant' Ana was first decorated for gallantry. Oh yes, he's a brave man. A reg'lar canebrake afire, understand?" We thought we did. There was no mistaking the irony in the grimace that twisted Buckalew's shaggy moustache. "Well, we'd as good as bagged Texas for Mex'can independence by sowing the prairie up from the coast with dead Gachupins and taking San Antone. But our generalissimo, who was a dam' Mex'can, made out to ship off fourteen of our biggest prisoners back to Spain, but on the way the guards, also Mex'cans, didn't admire the colour of a little forest brook where they camped, and they spilt into it all the proud Castilian blood they had handy. Lots of the Americans quit when they 66 THE LONE STAR learned about this massacre, and others about to come down from the States to help us lick Spain changed their minds, so that we had only some four hundred Americans left, besides something like seven hundred Mex'cans. 'Twasn't no ways likely that the Gachupins felt brotherly about it, either, and up come ten thousand of them from Mexico like ten thousand wildcats. But the eleven hundred of us poured out to meet them, and meet 'em we did, there on the Medina. "We Americans sailed right slap bang into whatever was in front, and the Gachupins give back three miles almost and broke, not bothering none about their cannon. But our Mex'can generalissimo was scared we'd wander round and get lost, I reckon, so we were brought back and alternated by companies with the Mex'can companies in a line of battle. Then, when the main Gachupin force got to work on us, the Mex'cans took wing and hoofed it rapid, which of coh'se tangled us Americans up in a devil of a hobble. But we hung on like a crawdad to a pickaninny's toe, and we wrecked the Royalist cavalry, and the Royalist general was getting real homesick, when a Mex'can colonel deserted us and told him as how we were near dead for water and weak as new-born calves, which was true enough. Well, those wildcats up and come at us hell- bent- for-e lection, and they certainly clawed powerful brisk. All told, gentlemen, it's heaps more enjoyable as a reminiscence. The sun and dust burned like a lime- kiln, and our powder was plaguey well all gone, too. Besides, it didn't seem to occur to the wildcats to take nary a prisoner, either." "And if they did," Bowie observed, "there'd still be the mines in Chihuahua for remorse." "Which," continued the old man, "I wasn't hanker- ing after, and above all on account of" He stopped, SANTA ANA, HERO 67 glanced toward the girl at her wheel, and lowered his voice. " On account of Nan's mother. You see, after we'd taken San Antone she'd followed me there, fol- lowed me from our little one-room cabin, which was this very room we are in now. Nan's mother, gentle- men, was another Jane Long for wanting to be near her husband on these Texian scrapes. Fact is, those two girls were in the same boarding school back in Natchez, where General Long and I courted 'em nigh about the same time. So there was Nan's mother" The gentle way in which he referred to his wife as Nan's mother made it evident that this described her best ' ' so there she was, waiting for me in San Antone, and," he spoke lower yet, "we were expecting Nan. The pore little girl was born two months later, and and she got just the one kiss from her mother. Gentlemen " He faltered, and suddenly doubling over his moustache, he caught it fiercely between his teeth. "Oh damn your Sant* Ana!" he burst forth. "I say it, damn " The wheel stopped short, and Nan hurried among us, and drew a stool beside her father. Her dark eyes were tender in sympathy, though she knew as little reason for his gust of fury as we did. "Oh well," he said, stroking her hair to recall himself. "Well, well, well," and he got boisterously, defiantly, into his jovial tone again, "as I was saying, you'll allow it was provocation enough along about then for me to figger on running some. We were on the slope of a hill, with the enemy below us. But there were some woods to the right, so I just streaked it down that hill oblique to'ards the wood. Running 'most into the enemy, I know, but I hoped to flank 'em, understand? I couldn't 'ave run up hill that day, not for the Queen of Sheby. 68 THE LONE STAR "But there's no Baptist parson, leastwise of my acquaintance, who would 'ave had time for a ser- mon before I was in the timber and pounding along through mesquite and chaparral like a frisky young steamboat, leaving murder and bushels of noise way behind as noways congenial, not but what there were lots of others mighty industr'ous on the same line of strategy. " Half a mile or so beyond I rounded off to the bottom of the ravine, 'lowing I'd follow it a bit, when there come someone a-crashing to'ards me down the opposite side, and before I could clamp on brakes, here was a bullet- headed, bilious-coloured young Mex'can plumping square into my arms. A Mex'can, yes, but he was smart on uniform, all contraptioned up with sash and gilt braid for a lieutenant, and I knew he belonged to the enemy, so I whirled him spinning and looked round for the rest of the en'my. But there was only him, and I stooped for my gun that I'd let drop, to run some more, when this here yellow Royalist scrambled up to his knees and grabbed my hand and begun kissing it. Ugh, it made me sick! "The way he blubbered his lingo! Oh, please not to shoot him! Oh amigo! Oh generous caballero! Oh wasn't he a mere boy! And he hated the Spanish. They made him fight for them. Oh please not to shoot! Oh please, and he would change sides! Faugh, he got me sure in the notion of taking a blizzard at him, anyhow. He wouldn't let go my hand, he just mouthed it. He'd been running away too, understand? Thought his own side was licked. And if there ever was a fawning cur, I saw it in his beady muskrat eyes. "Some of the other American fugitives had stopped to see what the fun was, being pretty well blowed too, and for each new one our prisoner started up again with SANTA ANA, HERO 69 his 'Noble, generous caballero, please not to shoot,' as though we'd be running if we'd a bullet left. "Then, quicker'n you'd wink, our faces went blank. Vicious little pot-shots everywhere, red sashes, blue coats, those woods were full in a minute with Spanish tiradores. Of coh'se we started to run again, but what does our snivelling cur do but jump up in front of us and begin slashing at us with his pretty sword! Oppor- tunist, eh? Lord, I never saw such a head-over-heels- right-about-face as that there. Quick as a cat he'd seen his mistake, and quicker yet he was just a-reaping glory out of it, going the big figger as brave as a button. The rat in his beady eyes was all tiger now, and he was savage as a meat-axe. He was yelling, too, calling us rebels and pirates, and pretending to himself he was all alone, as though he didn't know that a generalissimo, or only the Grand Mogul or something in a Continental cocked hat, was hustling up to help him with about a thousand men. He was too taken up, understand, capturing twenty or thirty Americans all by himself. "So now you know, gentlemen," the old man con- cluded, stooping over for a coal to relight his pipe, "how the future Napoleon of the West come to get decorated for bravery at the Battle on the Medina. Can you wonder that he's a dictator now?" " But " " But " There was a cloudburst of questions. "But how'd you get off? You didn't get killed, you didn't go to the mines, how'd you escape?" And then Bowie: "Do you know, Buck, I never have heard the end to that story. You can't mean that Sant' Ana saved your life? How did you get back to Mrs. Buckalew?" "Daddy," cried Nan, "I never heard even any of it before. And Colonel Bowie just spoke of my my mother. Was she in it too? Oh daddy, please!" 7 o THE LONE STAR We heard something crack. Buckalew's fist had tightened spasmodically over the long clay pipe. His face was really thunder-black for once. He opened his hand, and the two halves of the slender stem fell to the floor. "Your Sant' Ana," he exclaimed, "see now what he's done!" Nan sank to her knees, and tenderly picked up the bowl end of the pipe, which yet had a few inches of stem. But she hardly knew what she did, for there was awe on her face. She had never seen her father so before. All of us felt, though without understanding why, that the gentle old man had been pilloried to make for us a holi- day. Of course there was nothing more said about the end of the story. CHAPTER VII A SOBERING OF AMBITIONS WE WERE a tolerable party to camp in on a man but when anybody swore that a few of us at least must go on to Nacogdoches for the night, Buckalew would flare into a towering climax of all that was crabbed, mortally offended, indignant, and autocratic; though his mild eyes behind the tortoise-shells were beaming their very kindliest. So every one of us had to stay until morning, rolled up in rugs on the floors of ells and lean-to's. After a hearty breakfast we started for Nacogdoches. Old Man Buckalew and Nan went with us, he as alcalde to escort the distinguished guest; and she, Heaven only knows! Likely enough she didn't know herself; took it for granted that she was a man, too, I suppose. There was something memorable about her rawhide boots and spurs, and leather skirt, and buckskin gauntlets, and the demurely independent tilt of her sombrero, without hatpin or strings, and about the poise of her little figure on the mustang. I can see her yet, and most of all, the wavy black tendrils with the fugitive glint of bronze on the nut-brown neck. I saw them because I was riding behind, meekly riding behind. "Well, young Rip," said Nan's father, in his hospi- table way falling back with Deaf Smith and myself, "well, and what may you be making out to do in the settlements? We just been pestering Governor Houston to turn Texian. About you, now?" The question threw me back on myself headlong. I 71 72 THE LONE STAR had fostered a hazy notion of leading charges against the myrmidons of some Mexican tyrant, but I couldn't tell him that. I couldn't even tell it to myself, not after my tremendously heroic encounter with Lush Yandell the day before. "I think," I said, "I I'd like to be a settler." With the words I had decided. I would bend my falchion into a pruning hook, anti-climax or not. Others might spill the gore of despots, but as for me, I already longed to be a planter. It was grateful relief, too. At a blow I had disarmed the Future. She could no more conspire to make me ridiculous. "Good!" said Deaf Smith, and that clinched my resolve. "And be a Mexican citizen, a Mexican?" The voice was clear, bell-like. It was Nan's voice. She had turned her head half-round, her ears alert for the answer, and her profile was disdain itself. She had so honoured me, tentatively, wickedly, once or twice before, and I wished she might have seen Rosalie's glorifying attitude, and been rebuked. At least, why couldn't she let me alone? But there, what did her scoffing matter, anyhow? Yet this idea of changing citizenship was one that grated. Still, I wanted to be a Texan, so I would be a Mexican too, since that was the way. Nan, however, had never forgiven her father on the same score, and she hotly repudiated the whole business. It was her father who answered her now. "Not broke to the halter yet, are you, you little cata- mou't? But Texas being Mexico, you can't get out of Mexico unless you get out of Texas, and that's just what you're going to do, missy. Yes sir-ee, as sure as General Jackson's President, back you go to school, back to Natchez, as soon's the trails get good. Then," he added 'And be a Mexican citizen, a Mexican?' A SOBERING OF AMBITIONS 73 at his Grossest, though his eyes did not look it, "maybe there'll be some peace on the ranch." She laughed merrily, and touched a spur to her mus- tang; not without a taunting glance over her shoulder that made me feel inexplicably flattened out. Bowie's servant Jim had gone on ahead the night before, so that when we entered a beautiful wooded dell and came to quaint old adventurous Nacogdoches, there was a liberty pole with a flag at the top, and drums and fifes, and all the hardy Redlanders as eager to wel- come the grotesquely eminent American whom Bowie presented as they had been a few months-before to help Bowie drive out the Mexican garrison. Yet the thrifty little town of adobes and wood and a Spanish stone church was as much the home of Mexicans too, though for that matter the Sabines and Creeks who loafed about the streets or traded furs wore the nonchalant air of leading citizens. There is no need here to dwell on the warmth of the Redlander greeting to the superb barbarian who had come among them. Nor on the "horns" that were quaffed, or "the bowls crowned to heaven and liberty," as their guest solemnly put it. Nor on the sonorous address, as mighty as the deep voice of thunder, which gave those Redlanders to know that they had found their chief " The noblest power that might the world control . . . a brave and virtuous soul." But the orator frowned on open talk of war, whose fiery spirit he himself aroused. The blood mounted to his temples at the daring note, but sober sense halted the Hotspur in him. At least, they cried, he would return to Texas? He would come and represent them next spring at the meeting which was to ask for a separate 74 THE LONE STAR state government? Houston was deeply moved as he thanked them. The hope of redemption was in his breast. Leaving the Redlanders, and Nan and her father, we took the old San Antonio road, or contraband trace, as it was more aptly called, and began our journey southwest. How long it was! No one may appreciate the enormous capacity of this region for distances until he has dogged a trail for days and days and days across an ocean's space of waving grass. Then he begins to understand, and there is no measure for the respect that he has for Texas. We stopped at Bradshaw's, a settler's, the first night, and next day roved over the Mound Prairie, where at the dawn of Creation the Nassonis had also roved and had passed away. From the Trinity we headed more southward, direct on San Felipe de Austin. We were near the headwaters of the San Jacinto when a ghastly object jammed on the end of a sapling unnerved us with its horrid stench. The thing was a human head, of clotted hair and leaden flesh, and pecked at by crows. "Yes suh, wolf's law," said Bowie. "No courts, you know. No use to hunt thieves a week, and get shot at just to cowskin them. But they unduhstand this kind of a notice. Not pleasant, eh, Governor? But you'll admit it's reasonable lasting. Our friend Buckalew was a vigilance committee of one, once. Yandell had been driving off his hogs. You noticed Yandell seemed to have a grudge? Yes, well, Buck was in the wrong. He ought to've spared the rod. We all mostly do now. Then there's no hard feelings afterwards." I mention this, because it has its bearing later. We ate Christmas dinner at San Felipe. San Felipe was Mr. Austin's log-cabin village , a pretty little town too, overlooking the Brazos from a prairie bluff. San A SOBERING OF AMBITIONS 75 Felipe was not only headquarters for the colony, but had come to be regarded as the capital of all the American population in Texas. We did not see Mr. Austin, or Colonel Austin, to give him his authorised Mexican, title as commander over the militia he had to raise among the settlers against Indian raids. He was absent at the time, but colonists a hundred miles away rode in to shake hands with Sam Houston. They were not the Redlanders, though. They had no idea "of kicking 'less they were spurred again," and they looked hope- fully to the fair-promising Santa Ana. They were soil- loving farmers, and they were Mexican citizens, and if Mexico valued them, nothing was needed but Mexico's promises faithfully kept. I was for throwing in my lot here, as Mr. Austin was the first and almost the only successful empresario in Texas, but one morning during our stay, while I was reading The Constitutional Advocate and Texas Public Advertiser of San Felipe a big, but deserved name for a pioneer newspaper Deaf Smith began tapping an ear with two fingers, and I knew that he was going to say something pretty soon. "That's good land over at De Witt's," he announced. Deaf Smith's generalities were the most concrete things in human speech, and I pondered. The land at De Witt's, as well as the opportunities and immunity from land sharks, could not be more tempting than at Austin's, so I decided that the old scout must be a kind of alumnus in the pioneer line who was booming his Alma Mater. When Colonel Green De Witt of Rails County, Missouri, secured his grant, Deaf Smith was one of the six or seven men who blazed the trail and laid out the town for the new colony. Hence this affection for De Witt's, though he was too much the wanderer to stay there very long. But I reflected that the matter 76 THE LONE STAR went deeper. Deaf Smith would see to it that I had friends at De Witt's. Thus a half-dozen words from an old scout located for me my future Texan home. De Witt's marked the extreme western frontier of the American settlements. The grant lay two-thirds of the way from San Felipe to San Antonio, and our party was to go by there. " But," I objected, "there's Article Eleven?" This was the decree, as yet unrepealed by Santa Ana, which excluded more Americans from settling in Texas. We could have no scruples about evading it, if possible, because the Mexican Colonisation Law, a solemn compact between the empresarios and the govern- ment, expressly stated that the invitation to foreigners could not be withdrawn until the year 1840. We were then in the year 1832. Deaf Smith did not reply in words, but the odd look he gave me was ample guarantee of title. Mr. Austin, I learned afterward, had argued his contract rights with the Government Commissioner to such good effect that titles were still granted in his colony and De Witt's. Colonel De Witt had named his town Gonzales after the first governor of the State of Coahuila and Texas, and Gonzales we found on the bank of the Guadalupe, its thirty or forty log houses looking very much like a handful of brown dice strewn among the trees. Here again the buckskin-clad vikings of the prairie and their women in linsey-woolsey had gathered to see and hear and lionise the eminent stranger. There was eloquence from a stump in the middle of the Square, beside an old brass six-pounder that was invaluable as the imperson- ation of metaphor and the butt of gesture. Uncom- plainingly the old cannon had stood for grim-visaged war, for the dogs of war, for the frown of Mars, for the drum's tap, for the bugle's call, for the point of the bayonet, for the arbitrament of the sword, for the knife A SOBERING OF AMBITIONS 77 to the hilt, for the arrows that get carried along with the olive branch, for the hatchet that is dug up, for the lance that is broken with the foe, for the powder that is smelled, for the scabbard that is thrown away. It had stood for the mailed fist, for the tented field, for the clans that gather, for the blood that hands are imbrued in, for the shackles that are broken, for the torch that is kindled, for the arms that bristle. It had stood for the moats, crenellated battlements, et al. that enshrine the right, for the corselet and buckler that engird the same. It had stood for hardware and archi- tecture generally, for the manufacturing line and a little for the agricultural interests. It had stood for myth- ology, anatomy and zoology. It had even stood for itself, or a part thereof; as, "at the cannon's mouth." But I think that it had stood most from Al Martin. Al Martin was dumpy and portly, and he was the storekeeper at Gonzales. On the stump, in wool shirt sleeves and a coonskin vest, he was making a slang- wang speech as long as the longitude, to borrow again from Davy Crockett where the dictionary begins to totter. I was listening with the crowd under the trees, and growing a little weary, when Deaf Smith touched me on the arm, and I followed him away. But a lean- faced, leanly built, and very determined little man with a wiry goatee and sharp nose had a hand on Deaf Smith's shoulder, and was pushing him along. This aggressive chap had given the Honourable Sam Houston distinctly to understand that he, Houston, was the most welcome American that all of De Witt's, or Texas either, could possibly wish to know, either at that present moment, or in the aeons to come, sir! The wiry little man with his goatee and spiked nose was the alcalde of Gonzales, Ezekiel Williams by name, and it looked to me consider- ably as though Deaf Smith was being taken to jail. I 78 THE LONE STAR followed them direct to the ayuntamiento, or city hall, which was the most imposing log house on the Square, furnished as to the front room with a rough table, a stool to match, about ten feet of a tree trunk hewn flat on one side for a bench, and a print of General Jackson. Here Alcalde Ezekiel Williams released his prisoner, and ordered him to sit down. Then he turned on me with bird-like rapidity, gave my hand an excruciating wrench, and made me sit down too. "One headright league, Zeke," said Deaf Smith, as though calling for liquor. "With or without? With, of course. Got to!" Whereupon Mayor Zeke Williams clapped his hands for the chief of police, and the chief, who was a Mexican and wore sandals, presently appeared with a demijohn. Smith tilted the demijohn over his arm to his lips, he being yet under the frown of the law, and I had to do the same, nor did the upright mayor exempt himself. "One headright, eh? Oh, we got plenty in stock. Al'ays like to show goods. One, you say? Wish I could make you take a dozen, or lock you up. Reckon I'll lock you up anyhow. Could keep you here then. Who's it for?" Deaf Smith nodded toward me. "Got your passports? If not, lock you Oh, here they are, eh? Dam' sorry, though." Our snappy little mayor, with never a pause in the rapid fire of comment, straddled one corner of the table, and fluttered papers, and laboriously wrote my name and origin into a weighty looking document. This document proclaimed my steady habits and morality, and declared that my Christianity "was accredited," meaning that I was Catholic Apostolic Roman, though I wasn't. It was an easy-going voucher after all, and cost me a dollar and a half. Deaf Smith signed it, and A SOBERING OF AMBITIONS 79 was going out for the second witness required, when a big, handsome man entered and announced that he must shake hands with a certain garrulous old rascal yclept Deaf Smith. The big handsome man was Major James Kerr, who had laid out this very town of Gonzales. He had resigned from the Missouri legislature to come as surveyor and acting empresario of De Witt's colony. He was the first permanent settler west of the Colorado. He had been an early settler in Missouri too, going there from Kentucky, and being associated with no less a celebrity than Daniel Boone. Major Kerr's expression was kind and friendly, and I saw now why Deaf Smith had wanted me to come to De Witt's. The big Ken- tuckian readily put his name to my credentials, so that there was nothing more but to go forth and pick out my homestead. Next it would be surveyed, Colonel De Witt would approve, and the title would be issued by the Government Commissioner. The stamped paper for the deed would cost a few dollars, and that was all. Virtually for nothing, you observe, and I was duly grateful already to Mexico. Bowie and his party continued on west to San Antonio, and I was left behind at Gonzales, quite content. My first keen interest in Houston's visit had waned of late. The weighty intrigue seemed to have petered out. I had seen few Mexicans, almost none in uniform, and so little did Mexican authority intrude itself that I had to pause to remember that I was not on American soil. What hopes, then, that Houston had placed in Texan woes for rising again as a leader of men struck me now as a pathetic dream. In San Antonio the high Mexican officials extended him every courtesy, and he harangued the Comanche chiefs and gave them medals. But as for inducing the runaways to return to the United States, he failed. This was said to be due to jealousy on the 8o THE LONE STAR part of the Mexicans, who dreaded his influence over the savages. Houston returned to the United States soon after. On his way back he had a conference with Mr. Austin at San Felipe, and both agreed that trouble must be kept off as long as possible. But Houston wrote a letter to his friend, President Jackson, that would have made a big sensation at the time. He referred to Jackson's views "touching the acquisition of Texas by the United States," which, he said, was desired by nineteen- twentieths of the settlers. He found that there were no laws, that the government was despotic and dishonest, and that unless the Americans could obtain a state government of their own, they would separate from the Mexican federation. But I meantime was blissfully intrenched on my headright league, and thinking myself past all boyish notions of being impolite to despots; which only marked me as a boy still. Like a fool pendulum, I had swung impulsively to the other extreme. CHAPTER VIII THE PASSION FOR SPACE I STOOD on the prairie with my nigger and my dog. It was the centre of the universe; and I, a man of acres. The land where my shadow fell, had there been a shadow, was my land. I had come into my inheritance as a resident of the earth, for mine was now a man's share of the earth's crust. But with attainment came philosophy, and as usual in one's callow days, philosophy was another word for disillusion. Again I began to suspect that realisation hath not that allurement that pertaineth to distance. But it may have been the weather. A regular blue norther was stabbing through my cloak to the marrow in my bones. During the morning, as I rode to take possession of my patch of wilderness, the January sun had caressed with the warmth of spring, but abruptly the sun had gone out as realisation came in. Major Kerr, Alcalde Zeke Williams, Storekeeper Al Martin, and everybody else, had helped in the choosing of my headright league. But to be a tiller of the soil was not enough for me. I would also possess lowing herds, I, without a bank account. A stock-raiser was allowed extra land, and he had two years in which to show at least one hundred and twenty-five head of cattle or horses. Hence my domain measured a sitio complete, or more than four thousand acres. For days I had roamed up and down, looking the world over with a lustful eye to decide what part of it I should make 81 82 THE LONE STAR mine own. Major Kerr had suggested the alluvial country on the Guadalupe above Gonzales, and when I had dug into it with my hunting knife, I looked no further. As a great deal of our planet is water, a man should have his share of that too, and here I had the Guadalupe, and on its bank was the very spot among giant cypresses and live-oaks for a future galleried mansion from which to watch the passing of future steamboats. Then east- ward from the river, back of the timber, there also was my domain, the rolling prairie with islands of mesquite like old apple orchards. The surveyors had come and run the three lines of the square league, making the river the fourth, and between no point on those lines and the horizon did any cabin, or column of smoke, rise to intercept the vision. With that inborn craving of the American pioneer, stronger than the fear of Indian massacre, I too had chosen far from my neighbours. I was bred in the cities, and had ever been at elbow touch with my fellow beings, yet a whiff of the free prairie air had awakened, even in me, the big passion for Space. On first coming to Texas I had left my nigger and my dog and other belongings at Colonel Bowie's in San Antonio, and he had just forwarded them to me. It was heartening to have anyone glad to see me again, and Yappe and L'fitte certainly were. Yappe was short for Lagniappe, and signified good measure. He had been given to me by my father. Rather, we had been given to each other, before either of us could say "Thank you, sir," and since then that dear black boy of mine had followed me everywhere, even when I went to school back in the Free States. It was easy to bring a dog into Texas, but a Negro was different. Mexico had abolished slavery, and slaves were called peons, which THE PASSION FOR SPACE 83 meant that they represented no property investment, and cost their masters nothing during sickness and old age. But slaves as a property investment hurt the Mexican sensibilities too much, so Yappe was informed before we left New Orleans that he was henceforth an indentured servant. He didn't know what that was, but rather than stay behind he would have let the hoodoos change him into a fly-by-night alligator or aught else. We did not dare tell him, though, that he was free. He had seen free niggers back East, and the insult would have broken his heart of gold. So, with Yappe on his mouse-coloured mule, and our old pirate of a fox-hound, L'fitte, scouting on ahead, we had come this day to settle on our broad acres. But the wind had changed, and the norther had struck with its icy chill, and there we stood on the prairie, and not a roof in sight. "Yappe," said I, in a baronial manner, "you shall be majordomo." I needed to see him grin, and he did grin, and there was no cheer such as that to a forlorn soul. "Major- domo" was a luscious, high-stepping word, and he got it by heart. It had the twang of title, the pageantry of towering fuzzy cap and brass-knobbed baton, and rang enough like drum major to be the identical thing. But I was every bit as foolish. For I was reflecting that in time this place would be known over the settlements as "Ripley's," and the desire possessed me to anticipate the crystallising of custom by putting up a sign some- where with the letters on it. "Here, Yappe," I cried, "we'd better hurry. They only give us a year to mark our boundaries and put up a monumento at each corner." We wheeled at a gallop for the nearest surveyor's stake, and began piling a monument of stones over it. 84 THE LONE STAR Here was exultation and warmth too, and twilight blackened to a stormy night as we laboured. "Lawd, Mah's Harry, we gwine stah've to def!" Truly, we had forgotten about supper. There was bacon and ash-cake in our saddle bags, yet I begrudged even that little. I wanted everything to be furnished by my "estate," and through my own efforts. The good people at Gonzales were quite set on coming out for a cabin raising, but I wouldn't have it. I would build my home myself, nor would I let my father help me, either with money or more Negroes. So it appealed to me as eminently consistent to miss a few meals at first, until we could levy on the resources of our wilder- ness. No princelet ever knew the zest in starting a dynasty that I did in fastening upon my native earth; even though, as someone has said, it was like taking root in a marble slab. However, when I got a little more hungry, and a little more yet, I compromised by charging up the estate with the advance of bacon and ash-cake, and we retired to the shelter of the woods. First I taught Yappe what I had learned recently about kindling a fire in the wind and rain, and the pine cones were quickly roaring, Indians or no Indians. My, how those rashers of bacon did sizzle on the coals! And how I wish to-day that I could eat with the same appetite ! Having made sure of our supper, we fashioned a snug wickiup by drawing together the top branches of some young willows and weaving grasses into them. But Yappe, who wasn't toughened as yet, huddled close to the fire all night in a buffalo robe. Often, though, the shivers were too rampant for me also, and I would crawl out and sit on a log, toasting my face, and then my back, and smoking a pipe. But once I leaped up for quite another reason. I had gotten sound asleep, and had THE PASSION FOR SPACE 85 rolled over luxuriously in my robe, but in doing so I had flung out a hand, and my hand had fallen on something that was cold, and soft, and firm. My bedfellow was a long, sluggish copperhead coiled up next me for warmth. Ugh! Chattering birds roused us next morning at the bucolic hour of five, but I thanked them for starting me so early on life as a settler. For breakfast we had succulent trout out of the river, and tramping through the woods, we gathered persimmons, startled a mule-eared rabbit into a parody on greased lightning, and L'fitte treed a coon, nor did the coon escape. He went better than bacon, too. The rest of the day we devoted to the monumentos. The day following Yappe mentioned coffee, there being none, and we had to confess that the estate would not grow coffee. There were other things too, like sugar and salt and tobacco, and powder, and tools, and all cruelly dear because of the new Mexican tariff, though the government had at first agreed to keep such neces- sities on the free list for a term of years. To get them Yappe and I had to defer cabin building for the present, and we became trappers and hunters. We had the skin of the coon already to begin on. It was the nucleus of capital, and currency for "two bits," since ready money, as Crockett once observed, was "the shyest thing in all natur." Luckily we owned a respectable arsenal; double-barrelled guns for a dozen buckshot at a hundred yards, the latest rifles, and pistols by the brace, horse, hand and duelling, and I don't remember how many bowie knives. I shared my room-mate's books at college in order to buy these things. To my notion, they created that which books were made to record. Each new pat- tern of deadly weapon might be the very one to save my life and fulfil my destiny, and I simply had to 86 THE LONE STAR possess it. But I laughed happily at myself now. Des- tiny aside, they would do to bring down furs for market. The moose and elk had already gone farther west, and bear and antelope were beginning to follow, but we got one black bear, whose paws made a feast, whose hams we cured, and whose oil we saved. Wolves and foxes promised to stay with us yet awhile, and we hoped to do well by them for the trouble they gave us. Deer herded as common as sheep, and were not a bit more timid. Just before sunset they would come from the prairie to the shelter of the woods, and we had only to hide near their tracks to get all we wanted. Jerking meat alone kept us busy, but in a little while we loaded the horse and mule with our first consignment of skins, and Yappe set out for Gonzales with them. He returned the next evening, and then I appreciated the blessings of a town near at hand, for the two animals were laden with the things we needed so badly. But the earlier settlers did not have Al Martin's store to tide them over until they raised their first crop. They starved and they froze, and game falling short, they were lucky to bring down a wild horse from a passing herd. There were the Indians, too. Before the tassel- ling of the first corn, Gonzales had been burned, and the settlement almost wiped out. I clenched my jaws hard, because those days were not quite over yet. And I began to gather in the idea that another price than money might be paid for a home. Though Mexico acted never so handsomely to win her settlers, yet she had far and away the best of the bargain. "See here, Yappe," I demanded severely, "who have you been robbing?" It has been mentioned already that Lagniappe was equivalent to good measure, and here with our provisions he had bought an axe, an adze, a two-handed saw, an THE PASSION FOR SPACE 87 auger, and a hammer and nails. My majordomo dubiously scratched his ebon jaw. "Now, now, honey," he blustered, "jes' you wait. It it's de law." "The law?" " Ye-yeah sah, de law. Dat Caddy Williums, he " "Alcalde Williams, you mean." "Yeah suh. It's 'count uv him. He done load 'em on, an' he lock us bof up, case we don' 'cept. Mister Mahtin, he say so too." "It's a wonder, Yappe, you didn't bring along a steamboat while you were about it." "I done got a bo't," he returned imperturbably. And he had, a dug-out canoe, bartered from the Comanches. He had left it at Gonzales. There was a barrel of molasses there too, and another of brown sugar, which my father had sent me from his refinery by a schooner happening to touch at Port Lavaca. This was the chance for letters, and Yappe brought me a packet of them, the first since I had left home. All had written, including my baby brother Phil, who advised me con- fidentially that he was going to run away and come to Texas, before all the Indians got killed off. The longest letter was from Rosalie, with a postscript about the gold button from my first colonel's uniform. She took it for granted that I was mired in glory already, and she went tripping and hero-worshipping from start to finish until I grew large with importance and felt consoled. I had written Rosalie soon after leaving Nacogdoches. I needed to, to offset the exasperating disdain of that wild little Nan Buckalew. Out of the corn now on hand we picked the largest grains, on a misty theory of my own that they would yield large ones, and these we devoted to our memorable first crop. There was no plough, but after burning the 88 THE LONE STAR grass off of several acres we punched holes in the ground with a stick, and in each hole neatly laid a kernel to rest. And then maybe we didn't watch for the tender green of the very first spear! Again I knew the joy that obtains in the commencement of things. Pretty soon, too, we managed to acquire a few hogs, and these, like our traps, fattened for us unurged, and multiplied into the bargain. Their ambition in life was acorns and snakes. My affection for swine had always been coy and even dormant, until one day I saw them throttling a rattler. But you are not to imagine that we dwelt in a wickiup all this time. When Zeke Williams so defiantly loaned us the tools, we began chopping down pines and sawing logs. A home ought to be among trees and overlook a river, but I had to forego such an ideal. Major Kerr insisted that we build on the open prairie, and leave slits between the logs so as to aim a rifle in any direction. Hostile Indians were a constant possibility, so you may well believe that the rearing of my log cabin was attended with emotions. It was like the time I had a boil lanced, and our old doctor laid out his artery forceps in case of need. I had squirmed, taking the precaution for the danger itself, and that was the way with the rifle slits for Indians. But I covered the slits by decorating my walls with coloured prints, and miniatures of the folks and so kept the Constant Possibility out of the physical eye, at least. And I tried, too, not to expect the sudden screeching warwhoop as I lay on a bear rug beside the hearth, and worked over a Spanish grammar by the fat pine fire, or sneered at the exploits of Gil Bias. Spring gave signs early that year. The most beauti- ful flowers, and of the brightest colours, changed the waving ocean of prairie into a starry firmament. How- ever, this is a risky subject, for we Texans never know THE PASSION FOR SPACE 89 the word " Halt," once we get going on it. Our toughest citizen that ever cut a throat softens and mellows on the prairie in spring time. But for me the grass that could feed millions of buffalo had another message. Neither my colt, Boreas, that could certainly go like the wind, nor Yappe's mule, could ever eat so much, and the waste made me sick at heart. All that grass might be going into the manufacture of beef, if only. . . . But one' day I cracked my shins on an idea. Idea? The thing was Inspiration. Yappe and I had paddled up the river toward the hills north of us, and we had landed in the dense timber, hoping in this remote wood to attain a recent ambition of mine, which ambition was a panther. I coveted the skin, but it was really to determine if I had the grit to risk wounding the danger- ous beast. Suddenly we held our breath. Branches were crashing. Twigs were snapping. It was like seeing a ghost after telling ghost stories. But the animal was not a panther. Through the underbrush we caught a glimpse of a huge, black, horned beast making off like a streak of darkness. Still others stumbled to their feet and joined the panic. They could not be buffalo, not here in the timber. No, but they were wild cattle. La Salle had brought their progenitors over. Now for my lowing herds, now! What idea more unique than to rustle from poor old La Salle ! But I must have been very young in those days, and quick for any hope, so long as it was one that could not be realised. As easy to lasso the chamois as those elusive black bovines! We stalked them warily, pain- fully, but all to no purpose. At last one caught his horns for a second in the brush, and I got him with a lucky shot. "Anyhow," I said to Yappe, "here's rawhide for some new brogans." CHAPTER IX FOR A DOG BUT inspirations were not done with me yet. Yappe was serving lunch in the cabin one day when Boreas, tied just outside the door, commenced whinny- ing plaintively, and L'fitte darted out and uttered pro- test. Yappe 's teeth chattered. We thought of Indians. But they were not Indians, though they were surely horse thieves. We saw them only a quarter of a mile away, and their manes were flowing, and their tails curving out, and they were neighing seductively and throwing up their heels to picture the joys of freedom, and were altogether as full of pranks and mischief as well, as the frolicking wild mustangs that they were. It was a good thing for us that Boreas appreciated the social obligations entailed by a halter, or he would have jumped at their luring invitation. I mounted, unslung a lasso, and darted for the herd. But they regarded me wickedly for a moment, then with a parting kick of their hind hoofs went cavorting off across the prairie. The Barbary sires of these coquettish little revellers had come over with the first Spaniards, and the provo- cation to turn rustler was again all indicated. But this time help was needed, so Yappe and L'fitte and I closed up shop and started for Gonzales. The general store conducted by the dumpy and portly Al Martin in woollen shirt sleeves and coonskin vest was head- quarters for recruiting expeditions, whether to chastise Indians or to go out mustanging. Here we found 90 FOR A DOG 91 Captain Henry Brown on his way to trade with the Comanches, and his crippled brother, Waco Brown, so nicknamed because of his captivity by the Waco tribe. The Browns were Kentuckians, but they had come to Texas from Pike County, Missouri, and it was Captain Brown who had driven the Mexican garrison out of Velasco. Both were willing enough to acquire a cabal- lada of mustangs, which they could swap up and down the Guadalupe, and they circled around busily that evening to make up the rest of our party. Another who had taken part in the Velasco battle, who had been wounded there too, was Valentine Bennet. His headlight was on the river near mine, and we secured him for the hunt, besides four others of the colony, George Cottle, Old Paint Caldwell, Dan McCoy, and the deputy surveyor, Byrd Lockhart. Sill Leon also joined us. I should say, Don Silvestre de Leon, who was the son of Don Martin, the founder of De Leon's colony to the south of us. Then there was Sill's brother-in-law, and a splendid fellow too, Captain Pldcido Benavides. We had come to look on them both as our kind of people, and we were glad to have them along. And last, though first too, was grisly old Jack Castle- man, who happened to be in town for powder. Castle- man was not an amiable person. His craggy brows doubled on each other in a scowl when I first met him. " 'Nuther new un, eh?" he growled mournfully. "Blast my shoes, hit air a-gittin' crowded here, gittin' 'most ez thick 'twas back in Miz'ouri." Castleman was back- woodsman to the core. He had gone to Missouri because the Kentucky mountains were crowded, and since then the frontier had been shoving him farther off all the time. At present he lived with his family twenty miles west of me or anybody else, just where the Indians raiding eastward up over the edge of the 92 THE LONE STAR world would stumble on him first. But he enjoyed fighting them so well that they usually traced their warpaths a comfortable galloping range to one side of his cabin. "Hi thar, furriner," he said to me, as we talked over arrangements that night in Martin's back room, "I jedge we kin figger on you fer totin' the bellus? " Jack Castleman's mouth was always screwed down at either corner, and even when he spoke, his lips preserved the same sour arch. His was the countenance of the hopeless misanthrope, and had apparently set that way in the putty stage, to harden beyond the recall of a smile or cheerful thought. But I did not know him yet. "Bellows?" I repeated, innocent and eager as a lamb. "Whats the need of a bellows?" The tightly glued lips parted as though touched by acid. "Because," he said, glowering terribly, "when we cotch them mustangs to-morrer, they 'ull be plum' winded, an' ef they don' git air pumped inter them But what's the use ? The dry mud fell from the chinks during the storm of laughter in Martin's back room. Yet the humourist's set lips might have distilled vinegar. Those lips never once relaxed. I almost decided that I was not going to like Jack Castleman. All of these men had earned degrees from the big university of the frontier. They knew the learning of the wilderness. They could soften deer hide for a shirt. They could kindle a smokeless fire. They could keep their scalps on their heads. Of course, mustanging had a notable place in the curriculum, and Yappe and I meekly tagged along with so distinguished a faculty. They asked which way the herd had gone, and that was enough, since wild horses never wander very far off FOR A DOG 93 their range. The first day out we beheld their stream- ing tails. A beautiful stallion led, and behind him the herd clattered like a troop of cavalry, and quickly trotted over the sky line. But instead of following, we stopped at the first motte and began chopping timber for a corral. If that frisky herd was to be persuaded into that corral well, my own sense of humour unlimbered for action, though rather doubtfully, perhaps. "I reckon, sonny," said Jack Castleman, "ez me an' you kin jes' mosey along for the openin' lap." So the old misanthrope and I initiated the chase, if a leisurely promenade trot can be called that. We saw the herd again toward evening, but off on the right. You see, their range seldom had a radius of more than twenty miles, and they were circling on us. "Pore pestered critturs," said Castleman, "we'ull jes' let 'em graze aroun' some," and to my surprise he dismounted, laid out coffee, a water gourd, and a kettle, and began preparing supper. I was wary after the bellows episode, and half suspected that the real business of mustanging was going on elsewhere. Yet I asked no questions, though the backwoodsman soured visibly at my lack of curiosity, and when he rolled himself up to sleep, I did the same. But he got up now and then to feed the fire, which also was strange. The blaze, however, directed two horsemen our way, who roused me out of my dreams in a horror of being trampled to death. They were Captain Placido and Sill Leon. They hobbled their tired horses and saddled mine and Castleman's. "Cut straight to yo' right," Castleman grumbled at them sleepily from his blanket. "They're thar." By sunrise we were up, and cutting in the same direction. A column of smoke led us about noon to where Pla'cido and Leon had made camp. They had 94 THE LONE STAR kept on, they told us, until they almost ran into the sleeping herd; and after stampeding the dazed animals, had stopped to rest and wait for us. We four now proceeded together, and in a little while came again upon the herd. They were taking the repose that they were beginning to need more and more, but we merci- lessly drove them out of that, and chased them till nightfall. We were cooking supper when the two Browns passed us, and continued the chase in the direction we indicated. The corral was completed, they said, and the rest of the party was following close by relays. And so it happened, for at breakfast Val Bennet and Old Paint Caldwell came up to occupy our camp, after riding all night, while we four started out again in our turn to overtake the Browns. From now on the relays were short and swift, and the ever wearying herd, like so many wandering Jews, were not given a minute for rest. They no longer switched their tails so jauntily, or kicked up their heels at us. When Castleman and the two Mexicans and myself next passed on to the lead, there was a jaded mother and colt that had straggled. We lassoed them easily, necked the mare with one of our own horses, and drove them to the corral. After that others began to drop out of the herd, and our party, being now all together, were kept busy gather- ing them in. At last the stallion leader himself could go no farther. Castleman dismounted, walked into the herd, twined his fingers in the stallion's mane, and led him away as meek as an old family buggy horse. Cap- tivity was a grateful thing now, if it only meant rest and sleep; which it did in the corral. Thus we rustled from the Conquistadores. The old fellows, who were too vicious to be broken, we gave back to the prairie, but even so we had nearly FOR A DOG 95 eighty to divide, not counting eight asses and mules, and little beauties they all were. We came out of it with six or seven animals each, and Yappe was voted two colts as majordomo of the corral. Yappe remained behind in Gonzales with our share, and I went on home alone to improvise some sort of a pen for them. "Home," I believe I said. Well, it seemed so to me now. We do not really call a new location home until we get away from it once; and then, as a place to return to, whether a cave or castellated palace, it wears its name with familiarity at last. L'fitte coursed on ahead like a hom- ing pigeon, and turning out of the forest trail, I struck up a livelier gait across the prairie toward my cabin. But as I drew near, I perceived that the door was wide open, and that a man, lazily smoking a pipe, lay half sprawling against the jamb. "A passing stranger," I thought hospitably, or tried to think hospitably, but there was an insolent air of having taken possession about the man that got me on edge. I dismounted, whistled L'fitte to heel, flung my shotgun across my arm I had been shooting quail on the way and approached in foreboding to welcome my guest. I think I knew him first by the odour of his pipe. He looked up, noticing me casually. " W'y," he drawled, in the patronising way that always enraged me, "our little compadre, ef 'tain't!" But he gave no sign of moving; only cocked his hairy, mis- shapen head, and leered at me genially. "Howdy, Yandell," I said, more to try my uncertain voice than anything else. Then there was L'fitte at my heels, growling low, and all a-bristle. "Middlin'," he returned, still without offering to let me in my own house. "What what do you want?" 96 THE LONE STAR "W'y, nothin'," he said, feigning surprise at the question. "Why?" "Because, Yandell, if you're thinking of staying over- night, as you're welcome to do, I'd like to get in to cook up something." "Now," he drawled wickedly, "I take thet ez oncom- mon kind of ye, little compadre. But they 's a pig in there I jus' roasted, an' when that un's et, they's a few more left round here. But mebbe you're thinkin' for to stop over-night? Mebbe, now?" The lump in my throat burned like a hot coal. A few pigs left? Left from the precious nucleus of my stock ranch! And maybe I was thinking of staying over-night, in my own cabin? Yandell's meaning was clear. He had jumped my headright, that was it. A dreadful misgiving seized me, for I had not gotten my title yet. I had applied for it, indeed, but of late the Mexican Government had sent no commissioners through the colonies to give titles; had purposely sent none, as I afterward learned. So here I was, rudely jerked to the realisation that we were under a Mexican Govern- ment after all. It was notorious that Mexicans were favoured in land allotments, and Yandell counted as a Mexican. But to get the worst over with, I asked him if he didn't know that he was on my property. "W'y no, cain't say ez I do, compadrecito. Me an' some friends hev bought this here strip among others frurn the legislatur o' the State of Coahuila and Texas, an' all fur a cent an' a quarter per acre. Like to buy it back, mebbe, at a dollar? Yuh pa now, mebbe he'll lend ye " "No, he won't," I cried, "for I'll not ask him." " In which case," said Yandell, stretching his arms and yawning, "ye may ez well cut dirt. Run along, sabe?" "I won't! I won't!" FOR A DOG 97 My protest must have sounded like a raucous chal- lenge, or more likely, a heart-broken cry of distress. But at any rate, good old L'fitte darted from behind me straight at the invader. The dog shamed me, immeasur- ably. Though but a dog, he had the instinct of home more than I. He was the readier to defend it. His fangs gleaming, his ears back, he crouched to spring at the man's throat. Yandell laughed, and drew his pistol. He was leisurely aiming the pistol at my dog's head. "Don't you dare!" I screamed. And before I knew it, my gun was at my shoulder, and I had filled Lush Yandell with bird shot. CHAPTER X NEMESIS PRESERVED AT FIRST I could not bring myself to go near him. I dreaded to see the blood. It bewildered me to find how easy one could shoot a man. But to look on him afterward! What horrid pulp awaited me there ? What unsightly mutilation of flesh done by my own hand? And it was too late, the act could not be undone. But the passion to make him understand that I had not meant to go so far was a sudden mad thing in the brain. But, of course, he would never forgive. This was different from stepping on a man's toe in a crowd. Yet I could not adjust my world to the graver wrong. There was dazed agony, too, in the faltering realisation that I had done that wrong. But L'fitte again decided matters. As Yandell staggered up, L'fitte leaped and bore him down across the doorway. I rushed in then, and pried the hound's jaws from his throat. The fangs were dripping, and tangled in shredded beard. And then in Yandell I had a raging Berserker on my hands. Snarling, snap- ping like a mad beast, he clutched at my neck, but I straddled him on the floor, pinioned his wrists under either hand, and put all my weight and strength and fear of death into holding him there. His huge body lifted from the floor, lifting me with it. I had almost called to L'fitte, but with the effort he collapsed. His chin went back limp, and he whined, whined in pain. I had to bear low to hold him, and my face was close to his. The odour of his sweat and the fumes of his 98 NEMESIS PRESERVED 99 breath were in my nostrils, and his lacerated neck under the clotted beard was all bluish, like tainted beef. I Was turning sick. "Oh Lordy," I thought, "now I know I'm in Texas! " For of such skulking rarities as this Lush Yandell was the fame of Texas abroad. "L'fitte," I called faintly. The dog came, fawning, twisting his body apologetically. "Lie down there!" and I pointed to the floor at Yandell's head. L'fitte obeyed. He understood. So did Yandell. If Yandell moved now, the result would be his own fault, for I was too unstrung to take chances. With the man's whining in my ears, I got up dizzily, grabbed a halter from a nail, and bound his arms together. Next I lighted a candle, and with hands all a-tremble, bathed his throat, his frothing mouth, and the little pin-head bleeding places on his chest and face. Then by the candle's ghastly flickering I saw what I had not seen before. One eyeball was formless, viscid. It was slowly running out of its socket, mixed with blood. God, I could have prayed to the fellow then! It seemed I must have his pardon, or never know rest again. But there returned the dazed sense that to ask pardon for such a wrong was grotesque, preposterous, silly. In hobgoblin terror I dropped a cool wet cloth over the place, and bandaged his head. But I had seen it already, and bandages would never avail. With that a mortal fear began to grow in me. Hence- forth I should be a hunted man, hunted by this brute creature. He would regard my life as belonging to him, to take as he chose; in the dark, perhaps, from behind, with his knife. I got him on my bed, and watched him all night, giving him what comfort I could, and knowing that I succeeded when his groans swelled to vile curses. ioo THE LONE STAR But my vigil did not end with the dawn. I had the next day, the next night, and yet another day of it. Then at last Yappe arrived toward dusk with our wild mustangs. There was no pen for them, but Al Martin had sent along three Mexican peons to help Yappe bring them, and I hired the Mexicans to stay and build the corral. We hobbled the mustangs securely, and Yappe took my place beside the wounded man while I should go to Gonzales for a doctor. But luckily I did not have to go that far. Val Bennet's place was about half way, and as I drew near there toward midnight, I saw that his cabin was ablaze with candle lights, and heard fiddles and the shuffling of feet. I remembered. Val was having an infair for a bride and groom of the settlement. They had invited me, too, but Yandell had knocked such things as country frolics entirely out of my head. But perhaps the doc- tor was- there, and I reined in at the open door, where the light streamed out over me. The room was filled with beaming faces, heads bobbing merrily, and whirling forms "coming down the centre" or swinging partners. "Sir Roger deCoverley" twanged resolutely over the din of feet, and in a room beyond there was gay laughter and toasts to the bride. But Al Martin, in stock and frock coat now, who was shouting off the figures, saw my face in the full glare. "Grand right" and there he broke off short, getting down from the stool on which he was mounted. Others looked around, and saw me too. A word passed from lip to lip. The whirling, the laughter, the fiddles, all died away to hurried whispers. Rosy-cheeked girls turned pale, and men began to pick out their rifles from where they were stacked in the corner. " Indians 1" I heard the word now. "Where?" Everybody was crowding around me. NEMESIS PRESERVED 101 "No, no," I shouted. "It's not Indians. But " "Then what's ailin' ye?" "But your face, man, you're white as a ghost!" "And your hawse abustin' his bilers to git here!" "No, no!" I cried again. "I want Doctor Miller." Then from the throng rose a familiar voice, which had the timbre of laughter in it, and stroked the "r's" caressingly. "Well, well, Harry Ripley! My, you ceht'nly have been toughening up and growing some." "Colonel Bowie!" I cried joyfully, as I recognised his lean and comely features. The Bowie of cool cucumber blood, here was my man of men for emergencies. "Now Harry," said he, "get off your horse, and tell us all about it." I did not get off, but they soon knew what had hap- pened to Lush Yandell. "Lock him up!" snapped Zeke Williams, jerking at his wiry whisker. But the others were muttering things quite different, and strange things, too, which I did not understand. "You say," demanded Val Bennet, "that he'd bought your land?" "Bought it from the legislature?" demanded Major Kerr. "Yes, yes," I said, but they started to talking again among themselves. They were all feverishly concerned. There was a dangerous undercurrent here, and I felt it, still without comprehending. "Now it seems to me, gentlemen," said Major Kerr in his mellowest tone, "that our friend Rip is rather dis- posed to resent legislative interference." "With birdshot, fer instance," added Jack Castleman contemptuously, "But, p'raps, sonny," he growled, io2 THE LONE STAR "ye'll not be so sot on quail arter this, an' keep one bar'l ready fer skunks." "I reckon, gentlemen," said Bowie, "that you'd bettuh send Harry along with me. He'd be a delegate and a grievance rolled into one." "Just what I was going to add," said Major Kerr. "The very thing!" cried Val Bennet. But this was all mystery to me, or politics, and I had no time for it. "Look here," I interrupted, "I want the doctor, I tell you. The man's suffering." "And also tied?" asked Bennet. "Because," said Old Paint Caldwell in his plaintive Tennessee, "we'd be real grieved ef Yandell couldn't wait fer us." "But you needn't come," said I uneasily. "Doctor Miller will be enough." "Oh, Doc 'ull be happy to come along. Hey, Jim, won't you?" I looked to where Old Paint called, and saw our colony's doctor saddling his horse. But other horses were being saddled. I was almost alone. "Colonel," I cried, "what what are they going to do?" "Don't know, Harry," Bowie replied, "unless they're put out about that birdshot. They hate to think of poor Yandell suffering so." Then their strange mutterings turned transparent, and all at once I saw I saw a gruesome human head thrust on a stake by the roadside. "Oh what, what can I do?" I moaned. "There, Harry," said Bowie, putting his hand on my knee, "you'll stay here. It's out of your hands, boy. It's all Texas, now. All Texas is going to resent legislative interference, and we're beginning to-night, on Yandell." NEMESIS PRESERVED 103 "They mustn't! They mustn't. It's my house he's m- "Now look here, Harry," and his mild tone was the least bit severe, "don't you unduhstand that they'll really be saving your life too ? You know yourself how Yandell holds a grudge." Inside the cabin I saw men ramming home charges in their rifles. "They mustn't!" I cried desperately, and with that I kicked back with both spurs, and my horse leaped forward. But Bowie caught the bridle, caught the horse around the neck, and held us firm. "You can't do it, Harry." His tone was kind, and I almost thought there was a puzzled deference in it. "You can't, boy. They'll beat you there. This horse is plum' tired out." " Lend me yours, then." "No, Til not meddle. This isn't my bailiwick, you know. See here, you couldn't stand the race, anyhow. You're worse played out than your horse." No doubt. It was the third night I had not slept. But the first of the lynchers was mounting. Really not knowing what I did, except that he must be stopped, I jerked out my pistols. Instantly Bowie snatched them away. " None of that, suh! " Then he laughed good naturedly. "Why, you wouldn't hurt poor Zeke Williams, would you?" "But he's the first to get started, he's the blood- thirstiest of all!" Bowie laughed again. "You don't know him, Harry. Oh Zeke, here, wait a second!" "Can't!" panted the alcalde, riding past us. "Got to beat 'em there!" Then he was gone. io 4 THE LONE STAR "You see?" said Bowie in his mocking way. "Whar's my bridle?" rose Jack Castleman's growl in the dark. "And mine?" demanded Doctor Miller. The others were equally helpless. "That Zeke Williams," they grumbled. "We'll sure lock him up for this here! " They hunted, muttering vengeance, for at least ten minutes, and then the bride rose from the stool in the front room where she was sitting with the other excited women, and the missing harness was discovered on the floor under her skirts. Zeke had thought ten minutes would be enough, she explained. It was daybreak when we all drew rein at my cabin. We found Zeke Williams sitting in the doorway. He looked up at us, and grinned. "Might's well lay your dander, boys," he said. "Yes, he's gone. Done gone before I got here. Fact. " This was the truth. Yandell had contrived a word with the Mexicans who were building my corral. There had followed a wild confusion among the mustangs, and Yappe had abandoned patient and prisoner to hurry out to see what the trouble was. When he returned, Yandell was gone, and the Mexicans with him. CHAPTER XI A VIVIFYING OF POLITICS ONE week later, and I find myself in San Felipe de Austin. I am "a delegate and a grievance," though mostly in the latter capacity, I suspect. Major Kerr, Dr. Miller, and Captain Brown are more like the real delegates from Gonzales. We are in San Felipe for the purpose of holding a convention of all Texas. This accounts for Bowie's presence at Val Bennet's infair, as Bowie was then on his way from San An- tonio to the convention, and it explains the deeper meaning in his veiled statement at the time about all Texas resenting legislative interference. Until then politics had been for me a region coexten- sive with the arid wastes of boredom. I knew small patience with the heated arguments in Al Martin's store. No juries, no habeas corpus, no liberty of con- science, no self-taxation, nor self-governent, nor self- protection; these were mighty terms worn frazzled, it seemed to me, and not grievances. Even if there was a legislature off in Coahuila, with ten Coahuilans to two Texans, and even if the two Texans were sometimes expelled, what then? Why dissolve the state partner- ship when there were no evidences of our being joined? Of course, Coahuila's mountains and Mexicans were different from Texas plains and Texans, but the legis- lation for one did not obtrude itself on the other. The Coahuilans could loot their state treasury, so long as their tax gatherers did not come among us. The state could lease their cock-pits and levy on billiard tables, but we "5 106 THE LONE STAR far away in Texas smoked dutiable cigars duty free, no matter how. They could exclude Americans from Texas by decree, but they did not in fact. So altogether the legislature of the State of Coahuila and Texas was as vaguely imminent as a synod of deities off on Mount Olympus. Why berate Mexico, and pester her for separate statehood? Joyously, eagerly, and unhindered, I was making a home for myself, and I was grateful accordingly. Politics were a dreary business, a chronic malady of grumbling. And then a ruffian had entered my home, and by grace of a legislature off in Coahuila, announced himself the owner. Whereupon politics were acutely concrete, and statehood was no more the stalking horse of vapid oratory. Statehood was a poignantly desirable thing. And we all fed at the same rack. We all writhed under the sense of a cynical injustice. For that thieving pack calling itself our legislature, yet not Texans, were selling Texas lands, to themselves and their friends, the land sharks. Al Martin said truly enough. We had showed them that the lands had a value, and now the harpies were swooping down on the tempting plunder. They had just sold two million acres ,for a mess of gumbo, for thirty thousand dollars. Yes, portly, dumpy Al Martin said truly enough, and the spirit of the lynching party was in us. We asked for statehood, as had been solemnly prom- ised in the Mexican Constitution, and we believed that Santa Ana would see that the promise was kept. I wish the world could know our giants in council in that rude hall of logs as we Texans know them already. I know that I marvelled as I had not yet at this Texas land of good red blood. I felt smaller than ever, while my heart thrilled with the pride in being of that land. Very meekly I cast my ballot as I thought right. I was A VIVIFYING OF POLITICS 107 not on a battlefield now. It was the field of statecraft, of lofty endeavour, too, and I began to stir, unawares, with a fugitive, ineffable hope of ambition later on. You would not wonder, either, had you tingled under the eloquence of those Homeric giants. And you cer- tainly will not wonder when you know that among them was Sam Houston. He was the galvanic, superb, and powerful figure of them all. He had come with the Redlanders. He was a Texan now. "Gentlemen," he had said, "Sam Houston does not desert his native land. Sam Houston, gentlemen, will again be an American citizen, for he will take his adopted country with him." Yet not a word did he breathe of revolution. Big, simple man, he was the craftiest there. But no one would have thought so to watch him strolling about the crude wooden town; his red blanket, his wide red sash with fancy beadwork, his leather breeches and gaudy tiger-skin vest, and his gold-headed cane, and his tower- ing presence, making him the observed of every eye; and he winning every heart, too, with that affable smile of portly dignity. I can see him yet, as he doffed his great bell-crowned beaver to each settler's wife, or laughed almost to the whoop of an Indian among the wildest young daredevils on the Brazos. But the dangerous, resolute mood of all Texas might not have been kept in leash had it not been for one other, and I must speak of him, too, for it was through him that I went to the City of Mexico. He was a straightforward, guileless gentleman whom the children all liked. Worry and responsibility marked his gentle bearing now, and nagged cruelly at the enduring fortitude of the man. Yet there was a watchfulness, a plea for patience, in his kind, affectionate manner that ruled the convention with the hope of peace and relief both. Mexico would keep her promises, he confidently believed, so that even io8 THE LONE STAR the Redlanders almost believed so. His one care was to save the unprepared young colonies from war. He was our own Stephen Austin, whom Houston called the Father of Texas. Mr. Austin's reliance on Santa Ana's good faith was what really got me into the notion of going to Mexico. Like the other delegates, I came to regard Santa Ana as our best friend. Santa Ana would see justice done. He would get me the title to my headlight. Nothing simpler. And as Mr. Austin was going too, to submit our respectful petition for statehood, I asked Mr. Austin if I could not accompany him, and perhaps be of use as his secretary. He smiled in a fatherly way at my enthusiasm, and warned me that the journey would be very long, very hard, and exceedingly perilous. He had made it himself once before, on foot, disguised as a common soldier. That was when he went to obtain the colonisation grant already promised his father under the Spaniards. Thus Mr. Austin chatted with me until he thought I had gotten the notion out of my head. But I hadn't. The notion was hooked in too obstinately, and when he saw that, he smiled again and thanked me for my company on the trip. No wonder the children loved him! Not many days later we two had changed the waving prairie for a thousand miles of rugged sierra, passing first the mesquite desert and that torpid mud snake called the Rio Grande. We weathered the craggy billows of rock, we toiled on and on among thorns, we bent over a white, sun-blistered trail under a yellow sky, we huddled of a night in wayside adobes, knowing that scorpions crawled the rafters overhead, and wonder- ing if we were to be preserved yet the next day from the cutthroat bands in every gorge. And then, from the greatest height, we beheld at last the ancient paradise, A VIVIFYING OF POLITICS 109 the valley of Anahuac, and its off-lying lake in the skies. We beheld the glimmering, lazy city there, dozing in the green valley under two snow-clad peaks. It was a city of opulent stone, of paint-besmeared mud walls, of Jesuit facades, of Moresque domes like a garish mirage across the Arabian sand, of a citadel on a cypress- tapestried rock, and squat jacales surrounding. There were villas and cool gardens. There were narrow, chalk- dusty streets, swarming with blanketed vermin. They were vermin, poor souls, but a reproach to their priests and conquerors, and crawling as their rulers expected us to crawl expected of us Texans! Then there were plazas of flowers, -and stately paseos, and curvetting steeds and coronetted coaches, and Castilian cloaks, and ravishing eyes behind filmy lace mantillas. The journey's end was its own reward. We were in the capital of Mexico. It was our capital too, the capital of our swarthy, ever fighting, ever declaiming, ever smiling, bowing, proud, hidalgo-Indian rulers. The City was rejoicing, and the Nation; blanketed vermin, Castilian cloaks, all of them. They were acclaiming their Idol, their Libertador thrice over. They were acclaiming Santa Ana, their own Don An- tonio, the champion of Liberty and Constitution, the Napoleon of the West, the glory of all Mexicans. Heavens, how proud they were of him! They had just made him their president, unanimously. It was genuine, heartfelt pride. There was trust, affection, in it. No man, until that hour, was ever so loved in Mexico. For once the fulsome official joy was merely emphasis, whether it were in the monuments erected, in the por- traits painted, the speeches made, the bands playing, the flags, the Greek fire, the state legislatures declaring him "benemfrito of heroic grade," or whether in the change of Tampico's name to his own. because he had no THE LONE STAR repulsed the Spaniards there. These were sycophant things, but the new president was in the hearts of his people. There was no mistaking that. The Santanistas were partisans no longer. They were the Nation. Mr. Austin wrote back hopefully of his reception by the illustrious Santa Ana. "Is it likely," Santa Ana had told him, "that I, who risked my life for the very liberties the Texans desire, should look on them with indifference?" No, the Texans were his friends, and he grieved because we had not been treated with justice and liberality. Beside these glorious hopes for Texas, my own little plaint seemed trivial, though embodied in the general one. But I had no idea of bothering Mr. Austin with it lest in his kindness he might endanger the success of his mission for all of us. I was greatly astonished, therefore, when he said, "Oh, by the way, Harry, His Excellency was asking about you." "Surely," I exclaimed, "you did not trouble to men- tion my " "No," he replied, "though I was going to. But it seems he knew of your coming already." I started to laugh, but the perplexity in Mr. Austin's expression showed that he was not joking. We had heard before now of a hawk-like interest in whatever we Texans did, but this all-seeing foreknowledge of an obscure arrival like myself was almost uncanny. "Perhaps it's my father again," I ventured. That was usually the reason for my being singled out. "Of course," exclaimed Mr. Austin. "I remember now, the President said he wished to 'obsequiar' the son of Governor Ripley who had chosen to become a Mexican citizen. It's your chance to plead your case. But Harry," he added seriously, "don't forget the rest of us. The President is bound to think better of us if he knows A VIVIFYING OF POLITICS in one example of bona fide settler like you. So carry along that honest smile of yours, and do what you can for Texas." Bless me, how my ears burned! The Father of Texas himself was booming my poor discretion. Was it pos- sible that even I might count as something for Texas? I know that I wanted to, very much. CHAPTER XII THE DOMINANT IDOL THE most remarkable encounter of my life, except- ing those made vivid by bloodshed, was assuredly that one with the President of Mexico in his palace. A more distracting riddle in the way of a Latin-American has never, to my knowledge, toyed with the destinies of his country. To try to explain him is vexation; yet once started, one keeps on trying. At the time my experience of the world was still largely bounded by books, and projected into reality unreality would be better by an overweening imagination, so it was not strange that his was a character that left me hopelessly at sea. But to tell the truth, I haven't got my soundings in that quarter even yet. The layers on layers of twisted, baffling character that that man had! When you were most ready to declare him shallow, there you were again, floundering in un- known depths. The tortuous winding labyrinth of his soul no light might fathom. The man's career was an enigma no less. Each crisis in it would have been the knell of doom to any other career. His popularity when we came to Mexico looked solid enough to endure forever. Yet be- fore long his name was cursed, and in lieu of his flesh and bone for he had fled abroad his statues were crumbled underfoot. But the nation he had vilely betrayed and pillaged called him back, until he fled once more, basely leaving the capital to a foreign invader. Popular wrath then knew no ignominy commensurate THE DOMINANT IDOL 113 with its hate. But do not be too certain that this man's star was not to rise again. His was a mysterious hold that sucked as a leech at the people's heart, and that people welcomed him once more, and lifted him to a power more absolute than ever before. He was emperor, except in name, over a country that shot its emperors. But again the exception, he was not shot. He knew too well the science of running away in time. He died at last, a natural death. More, he died a natural death in Mexico. I know that I anticipate in this, farther even than my last page will carry. But I cannot resist, if only to show that it was not naivete* altogether that tangled me up in certain direful misconceptions regarding this man Santa Ana. Mr. Austin brought the friendly intimation from him one day that I might come at any time, but that same evening would do very well, if suiting my convenience. Mr. Austin smiled in his gentle way as he said it. Guile- less himself, he yet knew the sensitive punctilio of the people we were among, and he could smile at the delight- ful superficialities of Mexican intercourse. Consulting my august convenience, and my wardrobe as well a remnant wardrobe of former Louisiana days I donned a frilled shirt and white stock, a blue clawhammer with gold buttons, a heavy seal fob, and the rest, and hied myself across the Zocalo toward the Palacio Nacional just as the great-tongued Cathedral bell was giving the stroke of nine. Brown monkey-faced guards in yellow cloaks stood as rigid as their own bayonets in the wide Palacio door- way, and there were more of them in the big patio, and yet more up and down the staircase. I repressed my usual desire to explain the goodness of my intentions to aught resembling personified authority, and walked by ii 4 THE LONE STAR them. My garb was enough to belie the lack of self- assurance, and I put back my shoulders to fill out the right compass of importance, much as Hector swelled within the pilfered armour of Achilles. And as with Hector on that occasion, the gods were good to me, for at the head of the stairs a little black-moustached orderly in a cocked hat with rainbow plumes jtook my card and bowed and gestured and smiled, and would I deign to follow him? It seemed that I would, and I did; fol- lowed him plump into the state dining hall of crimson and gold, plump into a gorgeous state dinner then under way. Now I was too simple at the time to think anything than that I had blundered. Yet for the crafty Santa Ana to honour me at all betrayed intention, and one of his methods was to dazzle. Besides, there is often a quaint vanity in the great, especially in those new to power by race or training. It is barely possible, there- fore, that the President of Mexico wished even an ob- scure American to know that his state dinners were matters of 6clat as well as those in the executive mansion of Louisiana. However the blunder happened, this Santanista enigma is a guessing business better left to others. The generals and admirals at table, for so they seemed in their regalia, no doubt resented my intrusion. Each had his own ambition to forward, and a newcomer was one rival the more to rob them of precious moments with the sovereign chief. But these were Mexicans, and they betrayed the politician's human nature in a glance at most, and all their expressions were enlivened immediately after with tentative welcome. Then from the head of the table, which was begirt behind his chair with flunkies and orderlies and officers even to the rank of colonel, there arose a sallow, clean.- shaven man of THE DOMINANT IDOL 115 about forty with a tri-coloured cordon and many jewelled stars upon his breast. "A thousand pardons, caballeros," he said to his guests, unctuously, "but" he paused, looking at my card in his hand ; then turned to where I stood near him blinking under the glare of the candelabra, and before I knew it, I was shaking hands with the President of Mexico. His affable voice and manner put me at ease, but his hand involuntarily I started. The hand had a cold, soft feel, and I remembered the night when I had touched a coiled snake in my sleep "But ah yes, you are the son of " I understood his Spanish, and supplied my father's name for him. "But," I added hastily, "I can come another time." "No, no, no," he objected, putting the cold hand on my shoulder. "No, believe me, senor mio, it's my fault, entirely. I did not think of this little luncheon at the time, or " He paused, smiling, to see if he were forgiven. A cordiality so insinuating prompted me to speak. But as I met his eyes, the words were forgotten. The gracious smile was on his lips only. The eyes might have been of another man in another humour, and the effect was disconcerting. Have you ever watched a squirrel locate a nut under the snow, and then, sitting on his haunches, nimble at it hungrily ? If so, then you may have been fascinated, and revolted too, by the squirrel's eyes. They were quick, beautiful, bead-like eyes, but they were so steadily alert to aught that might disturb his gluttony, that the cold, cruel, metallic greed in them was none other than lecherous. Santa Ana's eyes were fine eyes, in a way; deep and round and large, like a seal's. But they were the squirrel's eyes, too, in their greed, in their cold, settled watchfulness. n6 THE LONE STAR "Ai, caballeros," he was saying, raising his voice for the company, "here we have a new fellow-citizen, for the first time in the capital of his adopted country." With which the hand passed behind me, and drew me toward the table, coiling more and more tightly, and I glorying in the honour. The generals and admirals muttered things courteous and gutteral with vast dignity. They were the rulers of Mexico, by leave of the ruler. They were senators, diputados, ministers, governors of states; which pre- cluded none from being a general into the bargain. If they had not been fighters, they wouldn't have been there at all. They bore the names of Mexican history for twenty years to come; names in conspiracy and revolution; in battles, victories, retreats, and massacre, in any synonym for bloodletting. Theirs were the names of dictators; names also of blindfolded wretches facing an adobe wall, the little score of ambition paid off at last. Among them was Gomez Farias, the Vice-President, an uncompromising Republican, and a genuine patriot. He had helped Santa Ana overturn the late dictator, and for cause he would as readily do likewise against Santa Ana. Gomez was a dour, severe man. As to feature and backbone, he might have been a Scotchman. An- other there was a Republican no less, a fiery one in his youth, a scholarly one in his later years. He had pleaded eloquently for his country's liberties in Madrid itself, and then, when this Santa Ana now at the same table with him held the king's commission, he was fighting Spain, or languishing three long years in a Spanish dun- geon. He would brave as much' again for the Con- stitution he had helped to frame. But just at present he was governor of the State of Mexico. Zavala was his name, and we in Texas afterwards came to know him THE DOMINANT IDOL 117 affectionately as Don Lorenzo, when he made his home among us on the San Jacinto. To a third man of that company I was assigned more especially, and I must speak of him too. He was a young colonel of immense spirits and cheerfulness. The Spaniards had hanged his father, the patriot priest Morelos, and here he was, aide-de-camp and favourite of Santa Ana, the one-time Royalist. This fact alone is a good master-key to the vagaries of Mexican politics. Colonel Almonte had been bred in the States, and as he got along quite as vivaciously in English as in Spanish, I naturally fell to his care. He had a chair drawn up for me, between himself and the President, and there I sat, in that high company, dazedly supping coffee and cognac, not knowing which was which, and puffing at a tremendous black cigar. Emotions were confused and glowing just then. My mother's tender smile flitted in the haze, tolerant and amused. Also there was a half-resentful wish that that Redlander girl might see me beside the powerful chief over eight million people, and be rebuked for her disdain. But the sus- picion grows on me that of Rosalie I did not think at all. What, however, is more to the point, is this the squirrel eyes were on me at that very moment. They gauged my pride and elation easily enough. Santa Ana could judge his man fiendishly well, else he would not have been a powerful chief over anybody. I was enthralled. In a boy's impulsive gratitude for being treated like a man, I would have done nearly anything he might ask. As it happened, I got an intimation to remain when all the others except Colonel Almonte got theirs to go, though with such oily suavity that they thought they were going of their own volition. Only the dour Farias regarded our host with aught like distrust. The reason was this, a general in the provinces n8 THE LONE STAR had that day "pronounced" for a centralised govern- ment with Santa Ana as dictator. But what would the high-minded Republican Santa Ana do in the face of so peculiar a revolution? The stern Farias was wondering, and he and Zavala went out, arm in arm, and Farias was talking low and earnestly. A baffled frown dark- ened the countenance of each. Santa Ana watched them go, and ferocity gleamed in his eyes. But his frown was not a baffled one. He read those two men perfectly. The smile was again on his lips as he turned to me. "Ha, now then, Senor Reeply, now to reward you for this long journey! Let us see, how would a title to your headright answer?" I nodded eagerly, yet wondered how he knew my trouble, since Mr. Austin had not told him. Colonel Almonte gaily led the way to the President's private sanctum, where he filled little copitas with cognac and passed around Havana cigarettes. He helped out my poor use of Spanish as I gave a flurried account of Lush Yandell's surprise party. "Ai de mi" cried the young Colonel, "but those are the things that most infuriate our Excelentisimo Presi- dente. The Excelentisimo," he went on, the word meaning a superlative kind of Excellency, "will not have his good friends the Texicanos so wronged by the Coahuila legislature, even if if he has to do away with legislatures altogether." " My title " I began. But His Excellency brushed the question aside, as though our Texas lands were not worth the pains of giving away. The governor of Coahuila would receive certain orders, and my title would be waiting for me on my return. "But Dios tnio," exclaimed the President, leaning THE DOMINANT IDOL 119 forward in his chair, and smiling at me with his lips, "one square league, that's not an alfalfa patch! The son of the Senor Governor Reeply But there, amigo, it will not take more paper, nor ink either, to give a title for let us say," and he held me intently in his gaze, his lips still smiling, "let us say for fifty leagues." I gasped as Almonte interpreted. Almonte's tone reflected the President's benevolence. There was no flaw in his master's finesse, but well, Almonte's tone was a shade too benevolent. Yet there were the fifty leagues. Fifty square leagues! How that magnificent estate stretched boundlessly to the horizon in the mind's eye! "Ten miles," Almonte's purring words fell on my ear, " ten miles of river frontage, if you wish." Now there is, I reverently believe, a God-given instinct for the soul. With us higher animals the senses and mind both may be duped, and the body ensnared, but the soul ... At any rate, I felt myself in deep water. Once in Louisiana, when I was out wading, the ugly flat head of a water-moccasin rose to the surface just in front of me, and you may imagine how I turned and splashed back to dry land. Mine was a similar performance now. Though I saw no venomous head, I felt that it was there. With cheeks burning lest I seem discourteous, I tried to find the right words for declining. But Almonte gave me no chance. "It would never do," he said gently, "to spurn the Excelentisimo's so kind offer. It " A low command cut him short. Though low, it was sharp like a pistol shot. His Excellency knew the be- ginning of a false play where the younger fox did not. At a bound we were safely off the fifty leagues, and imperceptibly I was lulled into the same fascinated state as before. 120 THE LONE STAR His Excellency, for instance, was kind enough to be interested in my labours and hopes as a settler. I did not plunge at once, but his sympathy was so genuine that directly my enthusiasms were loosed and going it full tilt. "But," I pleaded, remembering Mr. Austin's words, "all the others are the same way, sir. They only want a chance in their new homes to become the most flourish- ing and peaceable community you have in Mexico." "Bless me the saints," exclaimed the President, "you are a gifted observer, senor! Tell me, though, do the Indians trouble much?" "Not like they used to. You see, sir, the Texans are pretty good shots." "U-m, indeed?" He exchanged glances with Almonte. "And they are all armed, of course? Yes, yes, quite right, too." "Yes, and any invader of Texas will find things real pleasant." I merely wished him to understand that in her new citizens Mexico had a bulwark against a foreign foe, such as the Spaniards or French who might land on our coasts. "Yes sir, we'd not like to be invaded." "U-m, indeed?" he said again, and his quick glance toward Almonte was more peculiar than before. "Ai t but they are good Mexicans, Your Excellency." returned Almonte. "Even the how shall I say? the Redlanders." There was a delightful quizzing gaiety in the way he said it, and an equally delightful assumption of intimacy and confidence between him and me, as though we two could enjoy the droll idea of Redlanders being good Mexicans, and rather have the advantage of His Excellency's simplicity for imagining such a thing. "What the Redlanders may be," I said earnestly, THE DOMINANT IDOL 121 "depends entirely on His Excellency. At our conver- sation they shared Mr. Austin's hopes, and even Governor Houston " "Yoos-tone, ah!" I should not have mentioned that name. It swept the smile from the President's lips. "Pardon me, go on," he said. "Yoos-tone, yes. He is back in Texas. He has settled there?" "Near Nacogdoches, sir. They all urged him to, including the alcalde." "Eh, the alcalde? Yes, quite right. It's our policy to invite the best citizens. By the way, though, who is our alcalde there?" "Why, he he is one of the oldest pioneers in that part." "Don't you recall his name, senor?" the President queried gently. "Yes," I said, reddening to find my evasion nailed, "it's why, it's Mr. Buckalew." "Book-Bookalew? Ai, but I should know that name! An old pioneer, you say? Has he ever been to Mexico? No? Then perhaps he was in the Gachupin wars? " "Yes sir," I said, anxious to give Old Man Buckalew a clean political bill of health, "he fought the Spaniards for Mexican independence. There's nothing finer than to hear him spin his yarns about those days. Why, he helped take Goliad and San Antonio, and then " "And then?" my inquisitor prompted suavely, "Ha, and then the Battle on the Medina! And was that, senor, among the fine yarns of your garrulous friend? " But he knew already, from the hot blood in my tem- ples, that I must have heard the story. Except for the menace in the air, I could have laughed at that story now, for who could imagine the mighty personage before me, the Napoleon of the West, grovelling and kissing 122 THE LONE STAR the hand of Old Man Buckalew! It was too absurd to credit. Yet the metallic in the squirrel eyes left no question of those two men having met at the Battle on the Medina. There was something in the story, too, that Santa Ana did not wish told. And now he knew that Buckalew \jas still in Texas, and that Buckalew was telling it. "What harm, what powerful enemy, had I aroused against the gentle old soul back in Nacogdoches? "Ai, now I recall him" Santa Ana laughed so easily that I was convinced that Buckalew had twisted his story because of pique in being captured by the gallant young Mexican. If not, then His Excellency was the most nimble of eels for slipping out of ridicule " Ai, yes, but the memory is painful, because, senor, at that time I was an ardent, misguided youth, and righting against the liberties of my ever dear country. But his little sefiora? Ah. can you tell me how goes it with the little red-lipped senora?" "You mean Nan's mother?" Why, though, I wondered immediately after, should he ask such a question? " Ai, Dios," he exclaimed, "the fiery, delicious beauty that she was! But I forget, that was years ago. She is old and wrinkled by now, eh?" "She is dead," I blurted out. "Then this senonta you speak of, her daughter?" The first revolting greed in his eyes flamed anew. "This Nan, she is " "You mean Miss Buckalew, sir?" " A-h, and she, she also is exquisite? " " She? " I cried hotly. "She is just a child! " Then, for the first time that evening, 1 took the initiative as lord over my own movements. I mean that I rose to go, and I went. CHAPTER XIII THE LAND OF PROMISES THE Excelentisimo Presidente was not again taken with the desire for intimate converse, and I saw him no more during my stay unless at a bullfight or cock main. He could bet as eagerly on the roosters, and win as joyously, as any vermin-eaten leprero there. Aides to the rank of colonel surrounded him in his tapestried box, and the military band was ever ready for that crashing blare of triumph known as the diana whenever the Santanista cock survived. The Napoleon of the West copied the approved Napoleonic manner. He covered the pennies of the blanketed vulgar as though he were one of them, and allowed them a famil- iarity not accorded to generals and ladies with their jolden doubloons. Santa Ana's pride in his own particular breed of roosters was almost fatherly. Once, when one of them went down like a weighted corpse to the sea, the Presi- dent's sallow temples blackened ominously. He called his mayordomo, and charged him with not tying on the gaff properly. He all but struck the man, but there were many eyes on him, and with a " Vaya! " and a laugh, he shoved the fellow away good-naturedly. Then everybody laughed also, and everybody was charmed with His Excellency's way of assuming chagrin as a jest. That was the last time I saw Santa Ana in Mexico. But he had promised me what I had come for, so I was only waiting until Mr. Austin could finish his own mission. 123 i2 4 THE LONE STAR Once before in this country Mr. Austin had passed through the school of manana, where one learns to match delay with patience, yet for all that the good, simple man worked and waited in high hopes. But the promise for "to-morrow" grew into the week after, into the month after that, and more and more hazily into the future. The Mexican of the promise in this case was Santa Ana. But there was that general who had pro- nounced for Santa Ana as dictator. That general must be attended to first. Santa Ana took solemn oath that he would die rather than accept any power other than that stipulated by the Constitution; then marched forth at the head of a punitive army to chastise the traitorous general. But the punitive army turned on Santa Ana instead, and made him prisoner, and swore that it would hold him so until he consented to be dictator. Back in the capital the dour Farias and the unflinch- ing Zavala raised a Republican force of good citizens who would not allow their glorious champion of the Constitution to be made dictator against his will, and these set out to punish the punitive army. There was no mistaking the temper of the people, so at great peril to himself the Constitutional champion eluded the vigilance of his captors, and triumphantly reappeared in the capital. He deserved a rest, of course, and as the Church had to be taxed and the Army reduced, he left these un- popular measures to Farias, and retired to his baronial hacienda in the Hot Country. All this meant that Mr. Austin was having a despairing time of it. The dis- traught Farias would not promise what he could not perform, and he could perform nothing just then for a remote triviality like Texas. Next came the Cholera, and filled the streets with plumed hearses, or pine boxes on the THE LAND OF PROMISES 125 backs of peons. Hundreds, and finally thousands, went to their graves. There was famine, too, and riots, and assassination in every alley. But a pain in the stomach was the worst. It could be mistaken so easily for the pestilence, along with the clammy certainty of going one's way in a box before supper time. That awful summer was a summer of rank fear for me. Yet Mr. Austin stayed calmly on, and I could only lock my jaws hard and tight in his presence to keep from betraying myself. But one evening I thought surely that I had failed. Mr. Austin was busy over a letter, interlining, correcting. A grimness of decision marked his patient bearing. "Harry," he said, looking up at me with his unfailing kindness, "don't you think you've waited here long enough? Nothing keeps you." "You think, then you think I'm afraid?" The troubled lines between his eyes smoothed out, and he gazed at me curiously before he spoke. "It wasn't right, Harry, it wasn't right," he said slowly. "A useless risk, too. Why haven't you gone back to Texas?" "Then you think I'm afraid?" "Afraid? Heavens, my boy, who wouldn't be! I've lost count of how many they've carried out of this very house. But that's not the point. I've got to send back this letter." "And you stay behind, sir?" "That's not the point, either. Yes, I stay behind, for at least I can get them to repeal the Exclusion Act. Now this letter recommends our people to go ahead and form a state government. It's an open letter, but addressed to the ayuntamiento at San Antonio. You needn't take it any farther than Gonzales, as Zeke Williams can have it forwarded from there." i 2 6 THE LONE STAR In the daybreak mist one morning soon after I found myself beside the American driver of an old yellow Mexican diligencia. For half a week we steadily dropped thousands of feet toward the Gulf, leaving the twin snow-clads behind, and bringing the white-crested Orizaba ever nearer. The driver's carbine lay at his side, but he took it up now and then and held it cocked until we had passed a certain twist in the defile. At such a time he would mention some notorious bandit. In the overhanging gorges it was agonising. The robbers had only to loosen a boulder to crush the coach like a pill-box. We were as helpless as a crawling beetle. Nothing happened, however, and at last I stood on the deck of a coastwise barkentine, and in farewell to Mexico gazed at Orizaba's vanishing nightcap. The barkentine touched at Matamoras, and there I had the good luck to find a sloop loading for Port Lavaca. At Lavaca I hired two mules and a driver, and was soon plodding northward along the Guadalupe. Our good river, had evidently been on a rampage not long since. Tales of suffering were heard on all sides. Not Indians this time, nor our rulers, but our best friend, Nature, had turned against us. There had been floods, and after the floods, cholera had cast poison on the mouldy air. At Victoria the empresario himself, Don Martin de Leon, was a victim. At San Antonio James Bowie had lost his wife and two children, all his family. Then our own empresario, Colonel Green De Witt, had died in the capital of Coahuila, though not from the plague. His was a diploma in the School of Manana. He had worn himself out labouring for his contract rights. Two days north of Victoria I rode into my own Gonzales, and the first ten minutes of handshaking at Al Martin's were enough to lay my private anxieties. THE LAND OF PROMISES 127 Yappe alive? Lord, yes! Couldn't kill the nigger. Wished they could, though, he drove them so hard just 'cause he had the best furs to sell. Then that majordomo of mine had inveigled some lusty fellows with molasses into risking their necks until they had broken all the mustangs. But Lush Yandell? Well, now, nobody 'd seen hair nor hide of Yandell. The better for him, too, said Zeke Williams. "But here, Rip," he added, remembering something else, "here's service on you. Order to lock you up, I reckon." He handed out a portentous document, weighted with the seal of the State of Coahuila and Texas. I opened it, and all but shouted. It was the title to my head- right. It was on stamped paper, the fees and costs were marked exempt, and all requirements of cultivation and stocking were recorded as fulfilled to the satisfaction of the authorities. His Excellency merited his super- lative degree. He had made one promise good, at least. "But how in the world," I asked, "did it get here so soon?" "A Mexican brought it," Williams replied. " 'Bout the splendidest Mex I ever hope to see. All rigged out with an amber cigarette holder and an Englishman secretary, bright as a new pin right from Mexico City. He's travellin' over Texas, he says, and he's around town somewheres yet. You'll sure know him by the nice smell of them cigarettes. Havana, and white paper, too." I found the debonair stranger alone under the trees in the Square. He was contemplating our brass six- pounder, but as soon as he saw me, he had me in a Mexican hug, patting me fondly between the shoulder blades. He was Santa Ana's charming aide-de-camp, Colonel Almonte. He brushed aside my attempts to I2 8 THE LONE STAR thank him for the title. "Don Antonio," he said, meaning the President, "could not let his Texan friends suffer." Almonte himself was in Texas on that account. His Excellency had sent him to investigate conditions "for the governance," he added queerly, "of His Excel- lency's future policy toward us." "By the way," he said, turning to the cannon, "here's a nice bit of hollow ware." "It didn't come as hollow ware," I remonstrated. There was a certain fiction in labelling cannon smuggled to filibusters. "The Mexican government gave it to us to fight Indians with." "Of course," he laughed. "Can't I recognise the old Spanish casting? It is a pattern to admire, too. There are no more around here you can show me, I suppose?" "This is the only one," I said, not exactly liking his questions, " and we've never had any balls for it, either." "No? Oh, I wanted to ask, how did you leave Mr. Austin? Caramba, now there is a gentleman for you!" "Indeed yes," I agreed heartily. "But he is not treated right, nor Texas either. Your Congress won't give us any decision on our statehood petition." "Why don't you do without, par Dios?" "You haven't heard of Mr. Austin's letter, then?" "His letter?" "Yes, an open one to the ayuntamiento of San Antonio. I brought it, and our alcalde here has it now." The blithe aide-de-camp passed on to other matters, and like everybody else he met all over Texas, I was won by his cheery ways. But he left Gonzales the next morning, and he left for San Antonio, in company with the messenger Zeke Williams sent with the letter. But the recommendations in that letter were not heeded. The Texans did not go ahead and organise their state government. And the reason was this .THE LAND OF PROMISES 129 Mr. Austin had been arrested. He was on his way to join us, but he had been intercepted, taken back to the City of Mexico, and thrown into the dungeon of the Inquisition there. The Vice President, Farias, had been advised of his letter, and regarded it as seditious. At least, so long as Mr. Austin was kept a hostage in Mexico, the Texans would not imperil his life by following his recommendations. We could only nurse our chagrin, enraged and helpless. CHAPTER XIV THE CONSTANT POSSIBILITY WE IN Texas worked hard that winter to keep our minds off the ominous future. It was hard work, though, and the smouldering flame broke out in in- dignation meetings everywhere, and each settlement organised a committee of safety. We were, you see, always thinking of Mr. Austin in his dungeon, without pen or paper, without light, almost without air, and that alone was enough to make us feel wolfish all over. When spring opened, Yappe and I added cotton and cane to our corn patch. We had a milch cow, too, and a little drove of cattle, besides seventy or eighty swarms of bees. Yappe was really a majordomo now, for he had a peon family to boss. There was an old woman who cooked and washed, a yellow withered persimmon of an old man who smoked corn- husk cigarettes and made our leather clothes and brogans, his three sons and two nephews who were good vaqueros if it wasn't a feast day, and a small tribe of youngsters of muddled relationship. Sill Leon had thus solved our labour prob- lem by detaching this family from his own peons. I gave them what ground they wished to cultivate for themselves, which was little enough, and they had their share in what they did for me, so I called them the Peasantry. Our one-room log cabin was duplicated now by another, with a covered gallery between, and we started a lean-to at the rear for a kitchen. The Peasantry built themselves jacals of sapling stakes planted upright, 130 THE CONSTANT POSSIBILITY 131 which they plastered over with mud and thatched with tule. Yappe had another for himself and christened it the " Mayordomoria" a regular high-stepper, seven- league-boot word of which he boasted, though the Spanish language could not. Then we had a partly covered corral, a cow-shed, a smokehouse, a chicken- coop, and an old flat scow down on the river besides our dug-out canoe. Here was a fair start in breaking the wilderness, and I hoped more than ever that Mexico would not interfere. The future, indeed, gave r.ght promise during that summer of being able to take care of itself. Mr. Austin was no longer actually in prison, though still kept in the City without trial. He had been released by Santa Ana, who had returned to power just as the Church and Army were about to depose Farias. His Excellency had even regained Mr. Austin's confidence, and the letters home from our persistent optimist were again filled with hopes of peace. And then, in the early fall, when the sun rose at its brightest, the storm burst. The bursting, I may say, started on my ranch, and it was at first in the shape of Indians. As we had no powers of government for keeping up our ranger service, the red men were growing bold again. One day at noon, toward the last of September, a horseman emerged from the river timber and dismounted at my cabin. He was grizzly John Castleman, the old Missouri backwoods- man who lived twenty miles west beyond the frontier of De Witt's. His horse was dripping wet. He had swum the river instead of going down to the ford at Gonzales. His ride had been a hard one, but the sour curve was gone from his lips, and his old eyes were like coals in their pleasurable anticipation. " Hi thar, sonny," he called cheerily, "they're streakin' it perishin' fast right this here way." i 3 2 THE LONE STAR The gruff old misanthrope rarely looked so brightly on life, and I was all hospitality. He must be the fore- runner of some jolly party intent on a frolic at my house, I thought. "They've jes' skelped a packtrain down thar on Sandy Crik," he explained as to this amiable surprise party. " 'Twar plum' in sight of my cabin, an' " his acid lips set tight for an instant "I couldn't noways take a hand. Old woman an' the little uns, ye know. But thet kin all be made up comf'table, I jedge, ez they air headed this way." "Who are ? " I gasped. "W'y, the Carankawies, sonny. They hev crossed the deadline. " Now the deadline was the San Antonio River, and the Carancahuas were the demons of all the demon breeds of Texas. Mr. Austin and the settlers had driven them to the coast several years before, but the priests at the Goliad mission had interceded for them, and a treaty fixing the deadline was the result. "N-now honey," stammered Yappe, "now jes' you lis'en to me. You sho' gwine get hu't, stayin' heah, an* then wha' yo' ma say? Le's jes' all cl'ar out fo'Gunjalus." I looked around hungrily on my cabin, my jacals, my cattle, my ripening fields. We might save ourselves, but none of these would be here when we came back. "Oh hold your tongue, Yappe! " I burst on him peev- ishly. "No, wait. Saddle enough horses, and take these women and children with you. The rest of us " "Too late!" shouted old Castleman. "Here comes the hooray cane now!" Fifty yelling savages, all mounted and dripping water, broke from the timber. They were surely the Caran- cahuas. The harrowing legends had not been exag- gerated. They were magnificent, fierce, warlike giants, THE CONSTANT POSSIBILITY 133 and cannibals, too, if you wish, and on they rushed toward us, waving their long bows over their heads. "Quick thar!" bellowed our jolly misanthrope. All of us, Yappe, the Peasantry, the howling tribe of yellow pickaninnies, all of us skurried into the cabin. Old Castleman coolly marshalled our little force for business. He tore the luxurious newspaper tapestry from the rifle slits, and very glad I was now for those chinks. He shoved Yappe and the grown Mexicans to the side where they could aim at the Indians, and ordered them to "get occupied right peert." He stationed the old women and children to give us warning from the other directions. Even as he shouted these things, he fired his long rifle. The ounce ball must have scored, for his grunt was anything but pessimistic. The frantic two minutes of getting behind shelter were minutes of activity, and my mind had time for nothing else. But when I looked down my gun barrel, and saw those naked savages out there kneeling in the grass around us, and the cruel lean faces on them as they bent their enormous bows, I abruptly realised that the past three years in Texas had not hardened me to this sort of thing even yet. The arrows struck the logs with such impact, and quivered so terribly, I thought surely they must crash through the thick pines. Our old cook in the back of the room let out a scream that made my flesh creep. I turned, blindly enraged against her, but to be instantly frozen in horror. An arrow had passed through a crack, had shot across the powder-smoked room, and there was the old woman pinned against the wall. The long shaft was still trembling where it had fastened near her shoulder. I forced myself to her, while she gave scream after scream, and I shut my eyes, so as not to see the blood when it spouted, and pulled at the arrow with both hands. But i 3 4 THE LONE STAR the thing held tight. I opened my eyes; then burst out laughing, hysterically. The old woman had sunk half-way to the floor, and was hanging from her rebosa, the end of which was nailed to the wall by the arrow. I caught her up, and twirled her round until the scarf- like thing unwound itself from her neck and shoulders. Then I sat her down on the floor, and yelled at her frenziedly to shut up, and make the children shut up too. Accuracy with the bow like this was as deadly as rifle fire, and that was not the last arrow to drive in squarely among us. More will than I could very well command was needed to put my head at a chink, and when I did, I was seized with the mania to hold my fire. For it took so long to reload, and during that time the Indians might rush the door and find one help- less. To hold the load until then, and then to kill the particular man who might kill you in other words, the ultimate craving of personal combat this was the thing, and to waste shot on killing men in general seemed unutterable folly. How long we could have held them off, no one may tell. But we were saved at last through no effort of our own. For a moment it looked as though Jove the Thunderer had intervened. At least a distant volley of musketry from the direction of the river sounded so. But we could see no one, no one but the Indians. The Indians themselves pricked up their ears mighty sharp. There was more shooting out there in the wide world somewhere, and dismay lengthened the painted jaws of the savages around us. Up they sprang, darting back to their ponies, and rode off like the wind for the hills in the north. We flung open the doors, to let out the smoke and breathe again. And a breath of relief it was. There is this about great peril, that when it THE CONSTANT POSSIBILITY 135 is over, you forget that it is only a respite from mor- tality, and think the respite permanent. The price is not heavy, either, if for only a moment the low-hanging cloud of mortality seems dispersed. "Ai, a-mi-gos! A-mi-gos!" The shouting of many voices faintly reached our ears. "Mex-kins," said Castleman. "But what are they waiting for?" "For the river to flow by, I jedge. Sounds like ez if they're on th 'other side." With which Castleman and I ran down to the timber to make sure. Drawn up on the opposite bank, mounted, armed, and uniformed, were a hundred dragoons. "Squar'd up like they was the real breed," muttered Castleman. "Mex'kin soldiers, an' in Texas, whut kin they mean by it?" But at any rate, I couldn't be anything but very thankful, and I jumped into my canoe to go across and tell them so. The misanthrope, though, would not come. After his recent lease on life, the acid lips were again pursed down tight. "No," he said, "I reckon I'll jes' bide on this side here an' see whut happens fust." I paddled over, and was congratulated heartily by the captain of the troop. The captain was a friendly young Mexican with the eyes of a doe. His face was white yet from the recollection of our late peril. He had newly come to San Antonio from Mexico, and his horror of Indians had been acquired from bloodcurdling yarns. He scrutinised me curiously as a specimen of that incomprehensible race that actually defied the terrible red men. "Enrique Castonado, capitan, at your service, cabal- lero," he introduced himself in his own tongue, "and trusting," he went on, never stopping for breath, i 3 6 THE LONE STAR "that I have the felicity to find you well, senor. Ai, the saints preserve me, how I do feel that we could not avenge you on those barbarians! But take the trouble to notice the river. We could not cross. We could only hear shooting. Therefore I climbed a tree, and I saw. But what to do? It was quite required by tactics that we fire our carbines, and we fired them in the air. One volley. Two volleys. Zas, zas! the enemy dis- persed. What marksmanship more effective, tell me, senor?" Here was a piquant fellow of the right sort, I decided. "But," I demanded, "how did you happen this way at all?" "By the trail, senor. By the one we didn't take, be- cause we missed it during the night last night. But we stumbled on a new one, made by your friends the Indians. We are going to Gonzales. Perhaps you will have the goodness to direct us? "With pleasure. You have only to follow the river down stream for about thirty miles." "But Gonzales" He hesitated. "But Gonzales is on the other side of the river." "Yes, but you will find a ferry there." "Still," said Captain Castonado rather anxiously, "if we could cross now. Isn't that a flatboat you have over there? Perhaps you would have the goodness " "Certainly, I'll ask Castleman to bring it over." "Thank you, senor. But there there is another thing. You have firearms?" "Why of course, or we would be tomahawked by now." "But do you not know that His Excellency's new congress has forbidden the possession of firearms except by the military?" " H'm, but here in Texas everybody is the military." THE CONSTANT POSSIBILITY 137 "Ah, se/ior, but His Excellency's new congress has reduced the militia to one person for every five hundred. His Excellency means to garrison Texas henceforth for your protection, and" I give him credit in that the words came painfully "and to enforce the laws." "You don't mean Lord no, man, you are joking! " But he was not. His distressed manner showed it. "You want us to to give up our rifles? " "I am sorry, senor " " Mine is across the river, in my cabin, but- I had to stop, to get a new grip on the situation. I knew within me that I would resist, but how, how? I was never aware before of the eternal, incarnate, though often dormant, temper of my race. But I knew it in that moment. For the first time I knew that I was an American, in the essential meaning of the term. That demand to give up my arms made me know. The gorge rising within made me aware. " But mebbe ye won't now, jus' mebbe, ye little pizen varmint." The voice rasped to the marrow. From among the dragoons its owner appeared, Lush Yandell. But he still kept behind one of the horses, for he knew that Castleman and Castleman's rifle were on the opposite bank. He levelled his own rifle across the mustang's haunches at my breast, and his eye ran along the barrel. He had but one eye. In the socket of the other, on the more hairy side of his misshapen face, was a livid, red slit. I looked once at the empty socket, but I could look no more, though the impulse to do so was fiendish. Neither could I cry out to him not to shoot. By his own lawless code my life was his, and some force unknown held me from asking it of him. The cold sweat was on my forehead as I waited for the explosion of his gun. "No," and he laughed that galling laugh that always i 3 8 THE LONE STAR got me into a murderous state, "no, thet's plenty for jus' now. I only kinder wanted to make sure o' the colour of your liver, but it h'ain't changed none. It's ez dirty white ez ever, which means," he said, cocking his head and leering at me with his one eye, "which means thet you'ull be too mirac'lous useful to skin jus' yit. Ye see, compadre, skinnin's like the bottom swill in the jug; it'ull keep to the last an' taste better. But mebbe ye don't know you hev been durn useful already?" I started uneasily. "Oh, ye c'd guess, I reckin, 'cept thet guessin' is a sign o' intelleck." He paused to chuckle over his loath- some merriment, while he knocked his clay pipe against the saddle preparatory to befouling the air with the same. "Oh, ye didn't think, now, when you was guzzlin' brandy with the Presidente in his sumshus palacio, thet a poor ol' rough-neck like Lush Yandell hed boosted ye so high, oh no! An' ef Santy Ana didn't go for to pump yuh carcass empty, then Santy Ana is a wooden Indgin. But he ain't, ur the devil may hev my head fur a clam bake. O' course ye c'dn't guess thet my jumpin' your claim was jus' to set ye on to askin* fur favours, ur guess thet I let 'em know in Mex'co thet you was comin'." "What what harm did I do?" " Bless the cunnin' little bantlin', harm ? No, ye done good, sech ez givin' 'em an excuse to hold Daddy Austin 'tell they c'd git an army here." "You're talking too much, Yandell, for a spy. Don't you know Santa Ana is still promising all we want?" "Not now he ain't. He's sent five hundred men to San 'tone already, an' more comin'." "These dragoons are some of them then?" "Yes, an' I lost the trail fur 'em, ez I wanted to stop by here fur to get thet shotgun; you know, the one thet THE CONSTANT POSSIBILITY 139 spits birdshot. Oh, thet was monstrous cute o' you, compadre, basting out my eye. An' then, ez they might object down at Gonzales to our usin' their ferry, I thought we'd better cross here, knowin' ye hed thet old scow, so," and he levelled his rifle on me again, "so s'pose ye jus' call to ol' Jack Castleman, an' ast him to fotch it over. But be keerful," he added, "be dam' keerful what ye say." I decided to trust to Castleman. Some instinctive caution had kept him on the other side, and a like caution should make him divine my predicament. If not, then it would be time enough to provoke Yandell's menacing rifle. So I called to Castleman to bring over the scow; then waited, as for a sentence of death. "A-w," growled the old backwoodsman, and in Spanish, too, for the benefit of the Mexicans, "she's too big for one man, an' too much current, ki-ramba!" The click of a rifle being cocked struck my ears. " Tell him," said Yandell, "thet ef he don't, you're a dead un." But the generous young Mexican captain, all along impatient of the fellow's bullying, had had enough. With his sabre he knocked up the rifle. "The senor across there is perfectly right," he said. "Therefore Senor Reeply will have to help him. But," he added, " I will go too. His canoe will hold us both." Yandell scowled, but had to content himself with promising to hold a bead on me until we delivered the scow. Captain Castonado placed himself in the stern of the canoe, and I took the paddle. I worked slowly, for I had to do some thinking. I thought first of upsetting the canoe. But that would be foolish. The Mexicans would then drive Castleman to shelter with their rifles, while two or three of them swam across for the scow. 1 40 THE LONE STAR I looked ahead and saw Castleman baling it out, apparently, as every now and then he emptied a gourd of water over the side. I did not know that the old flat- boat leaked so much. But at last the canoe bumped into it, and I had decided nothing. Castleman untied the rope of the barge, and poised himself on the gunwale, ready to give possession. He had not divined the trouble after all, it seemed. I stepped from the canoe into the scow, too frantic with chagrin to notice that the water covered my ankles. Captain Castonado followed, smiling affably over the success of his plan. He stooped for one of the oars. And then everything in me came to a head all at once. "Senor!" I screamed, for I could not do it while his back was turned, and when he faced me, I struck him full on the chin, and over he went into the water. The Lord help me, it was cruel return on one who had just saved us from Indians. But I was beginning to learn that life, unlike life in books, is not simple at all; which makes it hard and requires a man to decide for the right course out of the maze. "Good!" cried Castleman. "Good an' clean! Now jump!" Yandell's slug-shot cut close over us as we both leaped to the bank, and fell on our faces. The dragoons fired wildly, spattering mud over us. A horny hand caught mine, and half dragged me as I squirmed into the thick bushes. "Thar now sonny," said Castleman, "jes' keep to kiver, an' we'll make it away frum here through the timber." "But the scow? They'll get the scow!" Castleman glanced back at the river. "I don't seem to see no scow," he observed. I did, for an instant only, as she sank. He had pulled THE CONSTANT POSSIBILITY 141 the plugs out of the bottom, and the force of our leap had shoved her into deep water. "I fergot that Mex'kin, though," he cried, bringing his rifle to aim. I knocked it up with my hand, and the shot went high just as the dripping Captain Castonado climbed into the canoe. I watched him paddle back to his dragoons before the raging misanthrope at my side could reload. "What a jelly-hearted baby you air!" he roared. "Now they got the canoe, an' they'ull git over here one by one an' burn yo' ranch, 'thout we stay here all night to take pot shots at 'em." "No danger," I said. "They're starting for Gonzales now." "Gonzales? Whut'd they do thar?" "How do I know? But that's where they'll find a ferry." "Then," said Castleman, again taking one of his rare cheerful views of the universe, "we'ull hev to git thar fust. The boys might be interested down thar at Gonzales." Interested? Well, of course we didn't know then that my doubled fist had struck the first blow of a War. CHAPTER XV PAUL REVERE JACK CASTLEMAN and I hit a good planter's pace, and as the dragoons on the other side of the river had no trail, we were certain to outstrip them. We roused Val Bennet on the way, but did not wait, and it was yet black dark when we galloped like a brace of Dick Turpins among the log houses and spreading trees of Gonzales. "Hi thar, Al!" bellowed Castleman, swerving his mustang alongside Martin's door. He pulled the latch string, pounded the door open with the butt of his rifle, ducked flat to the saddle, and in he rode. "Hi thar, storekeep, here air customers!" The dumpy merchant appeared from his back room, half-dressed and half-asleep, a candle in one hand, a musket in the other, and trying to rub his eyes with both. The rat-tat-tat of the mustang's hoofs on the floor made a terrific din. "How yuh, Jack?" said Martin. "But have a cheer. Make yourself more comfortable. And young Rip too! Howdy, Rip. But where 's your hawse? Ain't you afraid he'll cotch cold, leaving him outside?" "Now," said Castleman, "jes* git them peepers un- sewed, an' tell us which side the ferry's on." "Then they're coming, eh? Then they're coming?" "Air who comin'?" "Oh I dunno," said Martin, "if you don't. But we kind o' been looking for visitors ever since his lordship sent around the other day to fetch our six-pounder, our beloved Last Argument of Nations, sir." 142 PAUL REVERE 143 "An* bein' es you like argymint so well " "Of course we didn't give it up, Jack, but we thought his lordship'd be sending another messenger." " A hund'erd, Al! A hund'erd draggins, with carbines." "And here's three of us no, five, for Major Kerr and Byrd Lockhart are over at Zeke's, Zeke being gone down the river five at least." A hundred dragoons, and five of us! But compliance never entered anybody's head. Al Martin, puffing gradually more and more with indignation at thought of giving up our municipal pride and oratorical accessory, puffed his way out into the gray dawn to rouse the town, while Castleman and I hastened to the river, and brought the ferry and all other boats to our side of the river, as well as what settlers there were on the other side. Bennet rode in meantime, bringing Old Paint Cal dwell and Dan McCoy, and with George Cottle and John Sowell the blacksmith we now had eighteen men altogether. They were used to organising against Indians, but being only against Mexicans this time, they were light hearted about it. Of course Al Martin, his coonskin vest buttoned awry, could not miss the chance for a speech. There was the Tyrant who allowed to disarm us ere riveting on the Shackles, there was the Injustice that gnawed, and a phrase or two more preliminary to getting up steam, when Val Bennet sidetracked him. "Oh now, Al, don't be harsh, and we'll elect you captain." And this we did, on condition that the speech hold over till Sunday. The soft-voiced, big Major Kerr looked on in a fatherly way, and guessed he'd be a private. Val was for putting us through a drill at once. Since his getting shot up in the Velasco fight three years before, everybody regarded him as quite a Hannibal, and he accepted the r61e good-humouredly. I44 THE LONE STAR "But first," he said, "the Army of the People ought to meet as a strategic board of the whole and find out our vulnerable point." "Ain't got none," drawled Paint Caldwell. "Yet, "said Major Kerr, "you're overlooking the ford." To the ford accordingly, a half-mile below the town, we hurried, and with us we dragged the "Last Argu- ment." We must have it convenient for them, as Cap- tain Martin observed, when they should get across to take it. "But," he added, "I hope the next time the Mexicans give us a cannon, they'll throw in some balls for good measure." Blacksmith Sowell, however, came with his apron full of slugs, and we loaded her up with them, and pointed her ready for business at the opposite bank. "I say, you patriots," panted our dumpy chief, lean- ing on the ramrod, "let's make this here a regular Lexington o' Texas. I'd say Bunker Hill, only we ain't got any hill." Levity, though, was a foil only. Those eighteen men with their obstinacy over an old brass cannon the metal casting of their principles and manhood were about to bring down on Texas the power of eight millions of people. Had the matter been less grave, they could have been more serious. Then, across the river, we saw the dragoons. They came at a trot, straight to the ford. Yandell was no longer with them, for Yandell's own good private rea- sons, but he had advised them minutely. They splashed into the water, Captain Castonado making a gallant figure at their head. Our own 'captain ran down to the water's edge and waved his arms ferociously. "Hey there, stop!" he yelled. "Tell 'em," said Caldwell in his languorous Tennessee, "that hit's a middlin' dang'rous crossin' jes' at present." It had already been voted that my wretched Spanish PAUL REVERE 145 was the best among us, so I was to do the parleying. Now what was very curious, I did not connect Mexicans with terror in the least. After the Indians of yesterday, it was a relief to meet these new foes, and before I quite knew what I was at, I had ridden my horse out into the river up to his belly, and was holding up my hand to Castonado to halt him. "Ho, Senor Americano," he called in greeting, "my compliments, and a thousand thanks for the bath of yesterday. Thank you too," he added earnestly, "for knocking up that old man's rifle. If we fight, we are friends, eh?" I nodded "Yes" to his amiable paradox, then repeated what Major Kerr had told me to say. Captain Castonado was to do us the favour to keep himself and his dragoons on his own side of the river. " But why, senor?" He was rather puzzled. Being new to Texas and Texans, he did not connect the lounging little group of settlers on the bank with armed resistance. "Why, senor?" I jerked my thumb backward over my shoulder at that same little group. Sixteen rifles were levelled on the dragoons, and Val Bennet with a lighted cigarette stood beside the cannon. I wondered why the hundred dragoons did not charge, but a little thing called the personal equation was an unknown quantity to me at that time. Given the requisite difference in men, eighteen can weigh against a hundred. Captain Caston- ado stared at the levelled rifles, and he was unable to credit his senses. He flushed angrily, and next he wavered. "But tell them," he protested, "that I have only come for that cannon." "No use," I replied, "they can't give you an answer until our alcalde gets back." 1 46 THE LONE STAR "But senor, senor, I must not wait. My orders come indirectly from the President himself." "Then tell your president" It was Al Martin, fuming, splashing waist deep to my side. "Tell him," he roared, angrily drawing a bead on Castonado, "to come on and take his cannon, if he's in such a sweat for it!" Captain Castonado looked vacantly into the muzzle of the rifle. His expression took on life by degrees. At last he brought his sabre hilt to his chin at salute. "There is no hurry, senores," he said. He wheeled as at the order of a superior officer, and cantered back out of gun range with his dragoons. "Now then," said Martin, when he had splashed back with me to our own side, "we've got to scare up more men befoie His Castanets what's that captain's name? gets tired waiting. Paul Revere! Paul Revere! Who's to make the race? Who's to ask the Texians to decide for rights and liberties, to answer by the mouths of their rifles? Come forward, Paul Revere! Speak up, who?" Nobody volunteered. All of us wanted to stay behind and see the fun. In vain did Captain Martin order first one and then another on the errand. They only laughed at him, told him to go himself. We were a mutinous crew, altogether. Then they hit on me by common consent, because I was the easiest bullied, no doubt, and when I tried to make excuses, as they had done, they talked gruff and told me not to be peevish. "I know whut 'tis," said Jack Castleman, letting out a stream of tobacco juice to make way for the inspiration, "it's the Reddies. Sonny's a bit skeered." "Oh well, then," drawled Caldwell plaintively, "I reckon we'll hev to pick on someun else." "Hang it," I cried, "I'll " PAUL REVERE 147 "Wait," said Major Kerr gently, "because the man that does go will have to keep on to San Felipe. This business isn't going to end here, and we can't get along without Mr. Austin." "Mr. Austin?" I exclaimed. "Do you mean that he's back in Texas?" "Yes, they let him loose, not needing him any more for a hostage." "Then," I said, "I'll go. I want to see Mr. Austin." In the saddle, with spurs lifted for flight, I had to shake hands all round. I had not imagined that they cared. "Just keep the trail," said one, "till you hit the Colorado." "An* sonny," said my old pessimist, "ef you sure want to find them Reddies, you'ull hev to circle roun' to them hills nawth, an' cut fast et that, fer they wa'n't goin' very slow when we saw 'em last." So I was off, a messenger of War, rousing the clans. My fleet Boreas seemed to skim the ground, and the air of the prairie whistled past my ears. Now to take up the game with our old friend of bland words, of subtle incense, he of the superlative Excellency! He had been playing for Texas all the time, tricking us with promises until he was ready to drive us out. Well, let Texas be the stake then, our homes, and the home of our race henceforth! But who was there to pit against this consummate Lucifer who had schemed so craftily? I was being sent to Mr. Austin first of all. We looked to him as to a tribal patriarch. But Mr. Austin, with "patience to make any adversity ashamed," was too simple-hearted and as trusting as he was himself worthy of trust. He could never fathom and forestall the devil's own cunning against us. We needed a greater man here, a man as good i 4 8 THE LONE STAR and honest, but also with the intellect of Lucifer. Three years ago the settlers had felt, instinctively, the need of such a man, and they had sent for Drunken Sam! I could picture now the rage, the theatric majesty, in Houston's splendid eyes. But it was a rage that would strike bravely. It would strike craftily, too. He had already looked as far ahead as Santa Ana himself. Three years ago he had seen the game to be played, and on it he had staked his future, his hope of regenerate leader- ship and manhood. Yes, yes, he was our man, and the thought of the two colossal antagonists thrilled me as nothing in books and imagination had ever done. Here were Saxon force and Latin guile, the Old World conflict over again ; yet with a new element of conflict added on either side, that of the subtle Indian. Beside a struggle like this, my poor old " Iliad" was only discredited opera bouffe. Thus my fancies raced neck and neck with swift Boreas. But most of all the dramatic sense exacted that these two men should meet, that they should come face to face in the supreme climax, and then what an encounter we should have! My hair tingled to the roots as I galloped over the black rolling country, mid grass that looked like ordered fields of ripening grain. A half-dozen words at each log cabin, and there was yet another man-at-arms, mounted and grim, and gleeful too, flying back to join the Eight- een. I the clarion, the tocsin only, seemed to wield a magic power. It was the rousing of a people to arms, the genesis of serried ranks. Texas, like Achilles, was arming. To be only the Boy of the Errand, that was enough to turn a youngster's head, and as I say, my hair tingled to the roots. If my father, my mother, could behold me racing so gloriously! If they could see my gesture of a hero, or hear my voice, calling to all Texas that we, the Eighteen, had drawn the deadline back ' I was the firebrand, lighting the blaze to sweep the wilderness" PAUL REVERB 149 there on the Guadalupe, that there we had bade Mexico come no farther! I was the firebrand, lighting the blaze to sweep the wilderness. And if that little firebrand of a Nan Buckalew, if she but just there a wee pinch of sanity checked me. Still, I smiled patronisingly. I could feel kindly toward her, now. But was it not odd that in such exaltation I should remember the little wildcat at all? At Major Kerr's ranch on the Lavaca I hurried his Negroes to the settlements north and south with the news, as he had told me to, then changed horses after a bite to eat, and was off again. I spent the night in Bastrop, on the Colorado, at big John Moore's house. John Moore was a stout Indian fighter, and he started full speed the same night for Gonzales, taking every man for miles around. There they elected him colonel. Another day of hard riding, and I gained the richly golden wild rye of the Brazos bottoms, where it flour- ished in the shade of live-oaks. I climbed the prairie bluff a little farther on, and drew rein in San Felipe. Again the same splendid story. Men were galvanised at a word into grim centaurs. They were assembling already to march to the coast and intercept the Mexicans, but at my news they started at once for Gonzales. They were more lustful than any yet for the fight. These men were mad clear through. That's it mad! Mr. Austin was among them again, but broken, and suddenly aged, and the wan lines of suffering put in his settlers an anger abiding and implacable. They only wanted to know where to strike, and now they knew. Mr. Austin astounded me by laying his hand on my shoulder, and saying that I was a Texan indeed. He could think, he said, of no higher compliment. But I was fagged out, he went on, and after all I had done already, I must on no account think of starting back 1 5 o THE LONE STAR that night with his men. He was unable to go at once, and I must stay with him. I could not bear that he should think of me being tired, while my eyes filled with tears at sight of him. His haggard face, the gentle resignation there, the con- stant worry for his people, touched me to the quick. "Oh don't you know, sir," I cried, "that the kind of Texan I've been was to deprive Texas of yourself during the past two years? " He stared at me without comprehending. " I did, I did! Almonte wheedled it out of me." "Bless us, wheedled what?" "Why, about your letter. And then they threw you in prison." "Oh, is that it!" and he laughed blessed relief to my soul. "Why, my boy, the fault was mine, for writing such a letter. Of course they would arrest me for expressing my opinions. But the ayuntamiento at San Antonio sent back a certified copy. Neither Almonte or what you told him made the least difference." "It might have, though." "Well, as to that, we've both been tricked by too much faith in our fellow men. But now we are all going ahead with our eyes open. We are going to organise as a state, and the committees of safety have just issued a call for the convention. Perhaps you would like to take this call east for us ; say as far as Nacog- doches?" "And miss the fight at Gonzales?" Mr. Austin smiled tolerantly. "You see, Harry," he said, "we simply must have a government of some sort. Why, we haven't even our old pet aversion, the Coahuila legislature, any more. Santa Ana has abol- ished legislatures, congresses, and constitutions; every- thing, except Santa Ana." PAUL REVERE 151 "Then," I exclaimed, "all of Mexico ought to be with us against him!" "Only at Zacatecas, but Santa Ana defeated the governor there, and for three days his army murdered the citizens. It's the same army that's marching into Texas now." . "And Santa Ana too? " "Not yet perhaps, but his father-in-law, the Perfect Cuss, is." "The what?" "Well," said Mr. Austin, "to be exact, he does sign himself General Martin Perfecto de Cos, but our boys have adopted the other as a fair translation. Now back to the point. Texas alone must head the resistance for the rest of Mexico." "Yet there's the vice-president, sir, Gomez Farias?" "He is banished." "And Lorenzo Zavala?" "Zavala is in Texas, a fugitive. General Cos swears he will march here and take him if we do not give him up along with others on the proscribed list. That reminds me, Harry, a particular friend of yours is on this same list." "Who, sir, who?" "You know, that gentle old war-horse over at Nacog- doches, what's his name?" "Not not Mr. Buckalew?" "The very man, but why Santa Ana should have any- thing against him, I can't understand." But I knew. Santa Ana never would have remem- bered Buckalew's existence had I not blurted it out during that cursed night of incense and flattery in the palacio. To his public policy of gathering in dangerous leaders, the insatiate despot had added out of wounded private vanity the name of a harmless old gossip. The i 5 2 THE LONE STAR Napoleon of the West had sedulously nursed his for- midable reputation for bravery, and he could not endure that anyone should live who told the story of the Battle on the Medina. The utter cruelty of the man showed itself in this petty vindictive spirit more than in the wanton slaughter at Zacatecas. But the worst of it was, that I was the cause. I had been used again, thanks to the gloating Lush Yandell. And this time it was Nan's father who . . . "But Mr. Austin," I demanded, "Mr. Buckalew has been warned, hasn't he? " "Not yet, Harry. This infamous list only reached me to-day." "Then let me take that call for the convention. I'm off for Nacogdoches, sir." "You start bright and early in the morning, eh?" "No, sir, to-night. I'd only lose time, for I couldn't sleep." He protested that I should stay, but I had to benumb my thoughts and to keep moving until I dropped was the only opiate. All that night and the next day I rode, rode like a hunted murderer, eastward, steadily eastward, toward Nacogdoches. I no longer felt patronising, and I hoped in shame and dread that I might not have to see Nan Buckalew. I cringed at thought of her scorn. CHAPTER XVI THE MAN'S PHASE OP TREMBLING THE last long stage of that long, long ride from the Guadalupe to the Redlands seems like a brisk harrowing little jaunt to me now. The eye was filled, the mind busy, the emotions at sharp tension. The broad swell of prairie that was the Earth's very bosom, the wide rivers and timbered bottoms, the canebrakes like skeleton forests, the vague longing in the sunsets, the dazzling hope in the sun's rising, these would have been a surfeit of grandeur, cloying the hours with magnifi- cence. But greater than these was the insignificant thing among them, a man. A man, we will say, uncouth in garb of deerskin, unkempt of hair and beard, his feet sockless in rawhide brogans, astride a vicious little mustang, a long rifle across his saddle-bow, an ugly rigidity to his mouth, a buoyant gleam in his steely eyes, and speeding westward, westward to the Guadalupe. It was the man that quickened the minutes. He was a regiment of himself. I passed many like him, and each was speeding westward, westward to the Guada- lupe. My news had ravaged ahead of me like wildfire. These men were leaving their families behind. They knew that the Indians lurked between their cabins and the northern frontier. They knew the hideous possi- bility which does not require the naked words. More and more I marvelled at this race of men. I had to take myself by the collar to remember that I was of the same race. In the Redlands, where the wild spirit of the Neutral 154 THE LONE STAR Ground still prevailed, it was as I should have expected. Though the farthest from the scene of hostilities, the Redlanders were already girded to fighting trim. At Nacogdoches, at San Augustine, and up and down the Angelina, they had banded together. Their commander- in-chief was Sam Houston, the reddest Redlander of them all. But they had shown a restraint incredible, for Redlanders. I mean that they had not come out for independence. This had required a magician's ascen- dancy over them. It was a stroke of cunning, too, worthy of Santa Ana himself. For Houston knew well enough that Santa Ana would force them later, in the eyes of the world, to declare for independence. Here was his filibuster's alibi, and it was guile superb. It was finesse that made one sorry for His Excellency of the superlative degree. Another coup revealed the master craftsman. Hous- ton had gone among the Indians. They trusted him, and he set at naught the insidious promptings of Mexican agents. He made safe our frontier on the rear while settlers hastened hundreds of miles to the front. These things I learned as I rode, for my quest, of course, was the proscribed Buckalew. I think, though, that I asked first about Nan. She was still at boarding-school in Natchez, they told me greatly to my relief, but they rather reckoned that she had started home, having learned all she wanted. "And Old Man Buckalew?" "Nan's father? Why, he's gone to meet her. She's coming by water from New Awluns, and the Old Man set out for the coast soon's he heard this General Cos was coming too. Buck was skeered they might run into one 'nuther, I s'pose. Wanted to do the Perfect Cuss a good turn and head Nan off." "But where was she to land?" THE MAN'S PHASE OF TREMBLING 155 "Dunno, 'thout it's Matagorda." Now Matagorda was where Cos had landed. Bucka- lew perhaps had walked squarely into the clutches of the Mexican general. But if he had not, I might save him yet. "Or mebbe," shouted my informant as I darted off, "it was Copano." "Don't you know?" I cried. "Not likely, being as the Old Man didn't himself. Might even 'a' been Velasco, or," he yelled after me, "or Anahuac." Or there a few hundred miles, or over there a hundred miles farther! It was a cheerful game of tag for a man's life, a fitting Texas game. But I headed south, and after a time reached the mud town of Anahuac on Galveston Bay, yet only to learn that no New Orleans ship had been in there for weeks. Here I learned the latest news from Gonzales. Our Eighteen there had multiplied tenfold within a day or so, and then Casto- nado was informed, by a big painted sign on the cannon, that he might come and get it. He decided to wait for reinforcements. But the Texans hated to miss a fight after coming so far, so they crossed over. The Mexicans waited long enough to lose four men, then took wing for San Antonio. On the way they met five hundred more dragoons sent to aid them, but these turned back also, and left Al Martin his beloved Last Argument. During the day I crossed the Bay to Galveston, and put up for the night at an old stranded steamboat made into a tavern. The next morning I boarded a coasting vessel, and after dodging the Mexican "revenue collect- ing" privateers, we anchored at Velasco. But there was nothing to be learned at Velasco, nor at Matagorda either, except that the settlers were organising for an i S 6 THE LONE STAR attack on Goliad. At last, at Copano, I had news of Buckalew. He had met a boat at this port from New Orleans, and he and a young lady passenger on the boat had gone on to Goliad. But to Goliad, of all places! Goliad was alive with Mexicans, the town, the fort, the mission. Buckalew must be out of his senses. Then who was the young lady passenger? Oh yes, Nan, of course! She had availed herself, no doubt, of her right to grow some during the past three years. And would Santa Ana have a proscribed list for her too? He had been interested in her, I remembered, and a clammy sort of a recollection it was. And now she was in Goliad. So direct on Goliad I turned my horse's head. I need not have wanted for company on that short day's ride from the coast to the old slattern relict of a Spanish mission called Goliad. Huge ox-arts, with monstrous rough-hewn wheels that creaked and groaned, went lumbering along the dusty road. Tattered Mexi- cans with goads screeched incessant blasphemy. Little brown-faced soldiers in torn camisas and flapping cal- zones flanked each cart. They trudged stolidly under their knapsacks, and each bent his gaze to the pair of cracked sandalled heels in front of him. Ridiculous smooth-bore escopetas pointed variously across their shoulders at every star in the firmament, had there been stars. Officers on horseback prodded the rank and file now and again with their swords in abrupt spasms of duty, to remind themselves that they were officers. But, wanting company, I wanted not these. They were not the plainsmen hurrying to the seat of war. They were our foes. The plainsmen were in Texas through some instinct of racial greatness, but these had no need of Texas. Yet they had come they were being driven, rather to fight us. I looked down on the brownish, stupid faces, and contrasted them with the THE MAN'S PHASE OF TREMBLING 157 lithe red men who were our accustomed foe. It was insult. That Santa Ana could imagine that Amer- icans would ever kneel to conquerors like these! But a strong man, if cornered, can be brought down by rats at last. The vermin on the Copano road were the beginning of a swarthy horde. A vessel from Vera Cruz was unloading this pest of men and weight of metal upon us. Some of the carts were prickly with bay- onets. The forms of muskets bulged from coarse sacking. A heavily swathed lump, tapering to an ugly muzzle, was a cannon. There were chests and boxes and kegs, balls of six pounds, balls of an ounce, and powder. Here was death standing "ardent on the edge of war." In imagination I saw the belching of artillery, and heard the roar. I crouched under the "zip!" of bullets, covered my eyes against the glitter of steel, felt the warm blood trickling over my left side. Thus were the laden carts projected to carnage on the field of battle. It was a conceit that would not quit my thoughts, ride hard as I might. A new kind of fear crept over me stealthily. I mean the horror of mutila- tion, the hideous spectre of flesh and bone torn by a jagged shell, of entrails oozing, of brains spattered, of the ants and flies, and of the buzzard overhead, as one lies dying in the grass. The armour buckled on by the last three years of peril was melting, surely melting, into goose-flesh. It was stiff work to get one's jaws together, to clench them tight. Youth, you know, does not think of mangled human carrion. That is for maturity. It is the man's phase of trembling. And here I was at that pass already. Fighting had lost its glorious appeal forever. But there, people who are everlastingly teasing their souls for answers about themselves are dreary com- panions. It is too much the way with books, too, and i S 8 THE LONE STAR so long as there is anything to do, I am through with books. Nor will I write them; unless, in the spawn of things that get themselves called books, these reminis- cences should be so deified. Accordingly, that my own companionship might brighten to more cheerfulness, I tried as I rode to figure out how the horror of whizzing bullets and swaddled hollow-ware could be forstalled, nullified. The stuff was going first to Goliad, and at Goliad it and the vagabond soldiery would be let loose on Texas like a cloud of Egyptian locusts, as Crockett would say. Goliad was the portcullis, then. Goliad was the gateway. Well, and why not block the gate- way? Ha, I smiled patronisingly on myself. So, was this a military head I was trying to grow on my shoulders ? The beaten road followed the San Antonio River over a prairie as level as a floor, and it was not yet mid-after- noon when I saw on the hill, the old fort and mission whose bastioned walls overlooked the squalid town of Goliad. The very first jacal of logs and mud was now a sentry box, and as I came opposite, spewed its living contents over me. Yellow faces and claw-like fingers, up my horse they swarmed, and pulled me down as wolves do a wounded buffalo, and snatched away my rifle, my pistols, my knife. I had thought that this might happen, but had laid it to my fears, knowing that fear kept me from looking ahead clearly, and must be allowed for. Besides, since Nan's father was here, where else could I go? Unarmed and helpless in the middle of that gloating, gesticulating, rag-tag and bobtail hollow square, I felt particularly ridiculous. The sooner they could get me through the town up to the fort, and locked in from jeer- ing eyes, the better. But the villainous rabble of this villainous Mexican nest of smugglers and cutthroats gathered round, howling gleefully as they jostled or ran THE MAN'S PHASE OF TREMBLING 159 or darted in to make grimaces under my nose. We surged up a narrow, ravine-like street between mud walls, and we made haste not only slowly but tumult- uously. The hate boiled up in me, and surprised me too, for I did not think I was capable of it. But the screeching, scurvy louts, they knew that I was helpless. And yet, if I had my pistols or knife, would I dare use them? Would I, by any conscious act, rouse the vile taunts to the fury of blows ? I was just in the humilia- tion of deciding no, that I would not, when something wet spattered on my temple, and trickled slimily down my cheek. I swung round, and saw a grinning mouth and yellow fangs. This cur had spit in my face ! And down he went. I blotted the grinning mouth, the yellow fangs, from my sight. It happened so quickly, I did not know myself that I had struck. But down I went too, and was stifled under unclean flesh as the pack fought to tear me, jabbing viciously with their knives, jabbing each other as well as me. "Ah, now I say, the deuce!" It was a voice of bored surprise, of lifted eyebrows; a lazy, supercilious, patron- ising voice. "But senores, caballeros, re-ahly now!" He was a rescuer, perhaps. But, curse him, whoever he was, why was he meddling? That is just the way his drawling condescension exasperated me, even though he had saved my life. "Oh I say, you the sergeant, re-ahly now, fawncy ! " Whether the stranger with his broad English and flat Spanish was a person of authority, or whether the ser- geant of the guards who were helping murder me only took it for granted from his lofty manner, I did not know. But rough commands mixed with the yelps and grunts, and the pack on top of me thinned out, and opened, and I I saw the light of day once more. Also, getting painfully to my feet, I beheld what was a marvellous visitation 160 THE LONE STAR on that town of mud and rags. The visitation was a man of gorgeous raiment, of scarlet fox-hunting coat, of baggy white riding-breeches, of Hessian boots, highly polished and London made, of an ivory-handled crop under his arm, and of a ruby-jewelled snuff-box out of which he was then taking a pinch with a lordly gesture. I stared with blinking eyes. I myself was scratched and torn and dusty, in deerskin and woollen shirt, with open collar baring my tanned breast. Suddenly, meeting his lazily curious eyes, I hated this man and his flaunt- ing elegance. I hated him with an intensity and a virulence I have never known for another, not even for the vermin, not even for Lush Yandell. The man had the assurance of brass. He was as little conscious of being conspicuous among his fellow men as if they were the dogs of the street. He stood there, feet apart, fondling a drooping mous- tache, and indolently gazed at me as at a specimen of some kind, though not a particularly interesting one. He looked bored, the momentary diversion of my being murdered now having passed. He was thin, rather tall, and his shoulders were bent. He was, indeed, built on the downward stroke. Long sandy lashes hung sleepily over protruding eyes. An aquiline nose slanted to the parting of his moustache. This moustache was like an inverted golden harp that drooped over either corner of his mouth. The lower lip was a blubber lip, and that hung too, and his formless chin was nearly lost in his flabby neck. The rabble wavered between insult and salaams. If the visitation were not a buffoon, then he must be a grand seigneur come down from a distant planet. Pretty much the same childlike doubt Was my own. "Oh I say," and he put the snuff to his nostrils, and said it, "this is an Ameri-con!" THE MAN'S PHASE OF TREMBLING 161 There was no denying the classification. Our eminent zoologist had put me in the right species the very first time. "But fawncy an Ameri-con being huh, y'know?" If he thought I fancied it very much, he was mis- taken. I was looking for friends, I told him. The hand on his moustache jerked, and a funny light came into his bulby eyes. "Friends, de-uh me!" He waved his crop over the dusty street into which I had just been ground. "De- uh me, was there no other place to look for friends? " My stupidity made him dismal, and I would have apologised, only I wasn't feeling very jaunty. For some mysterious reason things were fading out, or tum- bling themselves over backward into an oncoming wave of darkness. The 'stranger's momentary interest had vanished, and he was turning away, leaving me to my captors, when the click of a horse's hoofs approaching up the narrow street caught his ear. It was a sharp, snappy trot, but sounds were getting blurred too, and I can only recall vaguely that the horse must have slowed up on breasting through the crowd. Its rider was just something filmy and white seen above the peaked sombreros, and she was coming nearer out of the black wave of darkness. And then I heard the second voice for that memorable day. "Oh, oh, the poor child is all over blood!" Poor child, indeed! But I forgave that, because of the voice, of this second voice that was so different from the cold, lazy drawl of the gaudy stranger. Low and clear and like a silver bell, it was the sweetest voice I had ever heard. It sounded so far away. The voice might have been of an angel leaning over the parapet of Heaven. My knees wobbled, the universe was drunken, but I saw the gaudy stranger's hat come off, and his 162 THE LONE STAR hand go out, for she of the voice had indicated that she would dismount. "If it isn't why, Harry, Harry!" My head had drooped limp on my breast, but she was peering up into my face. In the vanishing of the world, her features were beautiful. In the maze were a high Spanish comb, and hazel black eyes, swimming, tender eyes. . . . But no, in my condition, there could not have been recognition. And yet out of that dream state I muttered: "It's been three years three years three " "Quick, you sir," she cried, "he's bleeding to death! Oh Harry, Harry Ripley!" "De-uh me, Ripley, did you say? Ripley?" The drawl had quickened oddly. So, I had inter- ested the supercilious gentleman, after all! Yet why, why? But no matter, I resented it, even as my senses quit me. Curse him, what business was it of his. . . . And then I must have fallen into somebody's arms. It was many a day, though, before I found out whose irms they were. CHAPTER XVII THE TENTACLES OF THE DEVILFISH THE slashing I had come in for was no great matter. Of course afterward I winced at the thought of two severed ends of a vein being pulled together and tied into one again, or of the gaping lips of a slit across my ribs being sewed up, or of minor crevasses rendered normal skin-tight once more, but during the actual patching I was blissfully unconscious. And when I came to, it was in the greater bliss of feeling very, very tired, and of having a luxuriously soft bed under me. Only just lying there was a thoroughly satisfying physical content. I wondered if I were still in Goliad. But a dungeon cell in the fortress would hardly be equipped with feather beds. An old lady came in presently with some fresh bandages. Never once moving, but just lying there on my back feeling so good, I watched her. Wrin- kles lined her face, but they were very fine wrinkles, and she had brave, tender eyes. And she went at those bandages, ripping and sewing, as though she had done the same thing often before in times gone by. You would know that she had, because you could see far-away memory in the brave old eyes. Only when she laid a salve or something on the cloth, and leaned over to undo my swathed head, and saw my eyes wide open, did the sadly reminiscent look vanish. "Why, you po' dear!" she exclaimed softly, and out of the room she hurried, for coffee was more imperative now than bandages. She came back at once, exul- tantly agitated over my progress, and bearing a little 163 164 THE LONE STAR blue china cup on a blue china plate. She lifted my head in the crook of her arm, and held the cup to my lips. "Now then, child, you must try, do you hear?" The ineffable fragrance of our good old black drip coffee rose in bracing strength to my nostrils. "Louisiana?" I questioned gratefully. "Not quite, dear," she said, smiling as my mother would have done. "But Natchez is pretty nigh the same, and that's where I was raised. I am Mrs. Long." My senses were far from alert just then. But after- ward I knew. She was Jane Long, well-beloved through- out Texas, and the widow of that General Long who had fought the Spaniards. Old Man Buckalew had already told us, there that evening at his ranch with Bowie and Houston, Row he and General Long had courted their wives together in Natchez, and how their wives had followed them across the Neutral Ground into Texas. This made it clear why Mrs. Long seemed used to doing what she was doing for me now. "I want to know," I said weakly, "why I came to Goliad?" "Po' dear child," she murmured, "that is what none of us can imagine. Didn't you know how dangerous and foolish it was? Why, just the other day the Mexicans struck down the alcalde himself because he couldn't get them enough carts to take their ammunition to San Antone." I tossed uneasily. "But there was something I came to do something important I ' ' My head was gently lowered to that beautiful, heart's- ease pillow of my bed, and almost at once my eyes closed in the sweetest sleep. The subtle whispering sound of those filmy petti- coats that seem to pertain to young girls awoke me next. THE TENTACLES OF THE DEVILFISH 165 Yet I was too delightfully comfortable to stir, or even to open my eyes. "I declare to Goodness, child," exclaimed Mrs. Long, who was sitting near the head of my bed, "why will you wear those lovely New Awlins frocks, and only just to help me here with him?" "Ssh!" The newcomer no doubt had a finger to her lips. " How is he, Aunt Jane? Not conscious yet? " My eyes flew open. It was the voice of the angel who had leaned over the parapet of Heaven. But I made out less of her than even the night before, or how- ever long ago it was when I fell into somebody's arms. There was only the blurred vision of a radiant girl in light blue. They talked on in whispers, but I caught a word now and then mingling with my dream state. One name seemed to occur frequently, the name of a Mr. Gritton. And somehow I did not like that name. "Mr. Gritton" seemed to fit the gaudy stranger. And what business had he ... "But Aunt Jane, after all he's as lovable as a, a why, as a girl." I was hearing better now, for she had stolen quite near. (But the Devil take their lovable Mr. Gritton!) "And he is at least he was Oh I don't know! so sort of modest and timid and sensitive, and the way he used to blush, one wanted to just " Whatever one wanted to just do, she did not mention, but she probably bit her tongue, and almost over my pillow, it seemed. "O-oh," said Mrs. Long, " and who's blushing now, I wonder!" "Well, anyhow," cried the maid defiantly, "he was that aggravating, a girl simply pined to Oh you know! pull his hair anything to make him talk back ; only he wouldn't." (Lucky Mr. Gritton!) 1 66 THE LONE STAR "And," she added demurely, "I reckon I did nag him, for he'd get red and try to keep out of my way. Dear, dear, it's no wonder Daddy used to call me a little catamount!" "I notice," observed Mrs. Long sweetly, "that he does yet, dear." "Aunt Jane! But there, it's only Daddy's habit. And besides, we're not talking about Daddy just now. We're talking about about someone else; and about the first time I saw him." "The po' baby boy!" and I adored Mrs. Long for thus describing the odious Gritton. "Baby?" repeated the girl, and so indignantly that I wished Mrs. Long had not provoked his defence. "Baby, and with a jaw like that? Why Aunt Jane, he's almost undershot, though I don't recollect that he used to be. But that is just what is so exasperating; he doesn't know his own strength. That Mexican whose jaw he broke, he went down as if struck by an axe." There were splints on my right hand, and I reflected bitterly that 7 could not hit anyone without cracking my knuckles. What a contrast to the puissant Mr. Gritton ! "As Mr. Gritton says " But whatever Mr. Gritton had deigned to say, I did not hear, for there was another witching rustle of skirts, and then a soft, cool hand lightly touched my forehead. I sighed luxuriously, and the hand was jerked away. My eyes opened at the abruptness of it, opened to a lustrous black pair, to possibly seven freckles, and roses under the tan, and to the prettiest mouth that ever was. I sighed luxuriously again. " Kiss me," I ordered. I don't know how I could have said such a thing. THE TENTACLES OF THE DEVILFISH 167 But the kiss seemed an eminently desirable thing, and so I asked for it. The girl straightened to the rigidity of a tragedy queen, and she was furious all right. Mrs. Long laughed at her merrily. " Goodness," she said, "you mustn't mind! Don't you see he's half delirious?" My lady's face softened again at that, and there was that in her hesitation as she bent nearer that I thought for a moment and trembled, too, in exquisite longing that she was really going to. . . . But there, as Mrs. Long said, I was half delirious. Besides, the conceited expectancy was shattered an instant later, for the girl impetuously changed her mind, and flung herself away. "Oh, but he shall suffer a plenty for this!" she cried. "But not," Mrs. Long interposed, "until he gets over his real suffering, dear." After that I had an instinctive feeling for the girl's presence, yet not again during any waking moment while I lay there did I actually see her in the room. This was naturally an incentive to get well. It grew more and more necessary to see her again; absorbingly, poignantly necessary. It was the constant prod in my dreams, and the barb to delirium. The very feathers in the glorious feather-bed were turned to nettles. Who was she, this radiant niece of Mrs. Long's? For that also was vital. I must find out why the clear, sweet quality of her voice stirred my memory so. Of course, a voice like that stirred my heart, my whole being; but whv memory also? I had to find out. I did, therefore, get well, and much sooner than was possible to convince Mrs. Long of the samte. But one morning, after the dear old lady had brought my breakfast and gone out, and the house seemed quiet, I propped myself up and twisted around until I sat on 1 68 THE LONE STAR the edge of the bed. I tried my feet to the floor, and at once appreciated how seductive the bed was. But I held by the post and stood up, until gradually my head stopped hovering in midair and settled down where heads belong. It flew off again, though, when I let loose the post, and there was another delay trying to coax it back. The floor was very far away, too, for walking purposes, or else my legs had shrunk so that they had trouble in reaching down so great a distance. There were men's garments lying folded on a chair, and I recognised my extra hunting shirt, clean and recently mended, and my late habiliments of deer hide. With infinite cunning, since it was necessary to wait after each rush of blood to the head, or out of it, I pushed the chair with its treasures to the bed, where I sat and dressed. At last even the leggings were buckled, and I was ready to explore this house I was in. I hoped to provoke, if possible, some association of ideas to bring back to me the reason for my coming. It was curious, too, why I was not at that moment shackled to an iron ring in the old fort on the hill. But what if Mrs. Long's niece were in ambush, and in one of those lovely New Orleans frocks? I reddened like a fastidious collegian at thought of my hard-ridden togs, and lay down, to rest and think it over. Curse self-consciousness, anyhow! But not a footfall sounded in the whole house. I must be the only one at home. So I got up again, and navigated to one of two doors. I pushed it open, and there was the girl herself! As quiet as a mouse she had been, moving swiftly about in felt slippers. Nor was she in one of the frocks, but in crisp gingham, with the collar turned in, revealing a soft neck and throat, and with the sleeves rolled up. The room was dining-room and kitchen both. There were the Mexican charcoal braseros of brick and adobe THE TENTACLES OP THE DEVILFISH 169 against the wall, and the girl was evidently busy cook- ing. Yet in that case we would have an unusual broth for lunch, for what did that girl do, as I stood there unobserved, but gather up all the pewter spoons and drop them into the pot ? Other rare possessions followed, such as every metal dish or goblet, but still not satisfied, she looked around for more. The clock weight caught her eye, and she broke it from the pendulum, and added even that to her strange cookery. The lines of her face were set in defiant, pensive scorn. She could have been War's triumphant maid. The first time I had seen her she was tying the deadly gaff on a fighting cock. And now she was moulding bullets. But who could suspect that she would grow from sixteen to nineteen? In all my young experience of Life I had never met with a phenomenon so disconcerting. "Nan Miss Buckalew!" I cried. She turned round on me, greatly startled. But her alarm changed to instant relief on seeing who it was. "Oh, back to bed you go!" she exclaimed "If Aunt Jane were here, sir " I came toward her instead. She gave a hand to my elbow, but I wiggled away from it, not being a child, and managed to reach a split log used as a bench for the water bucket. "Tell me, where's your father?" I knew now why I had come. "Where's Daddy?" she repeated, "Well, no one is going to know that, until Daddy himself comes back." "But doesn't he know he's on the list, that he will be shot?" "Yes, he knows, but he's coming back just the same. And when he does " She paused to test the molten lead with a strip of paper. " And when he does, he will need some of these." 1 70 THE LONE STAR He would need bullets, in other words. "Miss Buckalew," I said, "do you know that his getting on the list was my fault?" She was pouring the lead into moulds, but she stopped, put her hands on her hips, and stared at me. Now I must say here that there was a certain touch of gaucherie in Nan's bearing and manner that made her more human and more lovable than a parapet angel. This touch of awkwardness was a reminder of her old torn-boy days when I first met her. I should call it now a sweet boyishness, a wholesome development of the lank, wild little girl in short leather skirts I had known. This faint elusive gaucherie was the outward expression of her honest, impulsive, untamed nature, the protest against stilted conventions as it was against studied grace. Well, after all, it was grace itself, and more, the piquant exuberance of a girl who has just left her education behind her. "Your fault?" she questioned. "Yes," I mumbled resolutely, "Santa Ana got your father's name from me, and at once concluded that it was your father who had been telling that story about " It was my turn to stare now, for instead of reproach, she gave way to delight unbounded, laughing and clap- ping her hands. "Harry Ripley," she cried. "You don't mean Oh good, good for you! About the Battle on the Medina, you mean? Oh, oh, and didn't that make your Sant' Ana feel happy, though!" " But just the same, young lady, my Santa Ana wants to fasten the joke back on your father, and if he catches him once " She sobered a little at that. THE TENTACLES OF THE DEVILFISH i 7I "Oh well, it's all right," she said. " We were warned in time by Mr. Gritton." "Who's Mr. Gritton?" Her eyebrows arched at my savage tone. "Oh dear me," she said, "you really mustn't feel so bad over Mr. Gritton saving Daddy. He seems to save nearly everybody, anyhow. Don't you know that Mr. Gritton was one of the commissioners that our people sent to General Cos to get this very list revoked, only Cos wouldn't? Then he Mr. Gritton came all the way to warn those on the list. He had to follow Daddy clear to Copano, too. Now I think that that was splendid of him." Having done the same thing myself, though she knew it not, I did not think one way or the other. "Mr. Gritton," she went on, "was with Daddy and Aunt Jane Mrs. Long is my good-as-aunt, you know, and everybody else's when they met me as I landed last week at Copano. It was then that he told Daddy about the list, and while Daddy cleared out he Mr. Gritton saw Aunt Jane and me safely here where Aunt Jane has lived all these years. Oh yes," she concluded, looking my way out of the tail of her eye as she bent over her work, "Mr. Gritton saved Daddy all right." "But what made him wait so long? Why did he have to wait until after he had seen you?" The lashes curtaining her eyes lifted, and she regarded me almost tenderly for a moment. "Perhaps," she said, and you could see that she was a little perplexed, "you do not know that Mr. Gritton first came to Texas with Colonel Almonte?" "Almonte?" I leaped to my feet, but something like a knife in my left side brought me back quickly. "He came with Almonte?" "Yes, as his secretary." i 7 2 THE LONE STAR " But but Almonte was no more than a spy ! " "Of course, don't we all know that, now? Almonte Was really taking notes for invasion. But that's just why Mr. Gritton left him and became a Texian." " I see. Then this Gritton couldn't have been hunting your father at Santa Ana's orders? " " Harry, Harry, didn't I tell you that he saved Daddy !" "Yes, after he had seen you." She did not look so tenderly this time. More prob- ably she was going to stamp her foot. But there was a rapping on the street door, and she hastened out, pulling down her sleeves as she went. When she returned, heavy footsteps sounded close behind. "Mr. Gritton," she announced wickedly, and there in the doorway appeared the supercilious and gaudy stranger whom I already hated. Marvel of marvels for Texas, his lean, stooped figure was arrayed in a complete change, yet as completely as before exuding a lofty and indolent elegance. Fully "arm'd in impudence," all mankind to brave, was this Englishman. For, of course, he was an Englishman. His regalia now comprised tight doeskin pantaloons with straps, a long-skirted coat whose wide velvet collar had the exaggerated roll seen in prints of his own King William, a flowered vest, a frilled shirt, and a very high white stock so dainty in its purity as to rebuke hunting shirts with no stock at all. I began to disapprove of him more inordinately than ever, especially as it was impossible to tell whether Miss Nan Buckalew disap- proved or not. I looked for the diffident blushes she had so adored, but though her Mr. Gritton was a pink specimen enough, yet it was a settled floridity, and as for diffidence, that was the very last thing anyone might expect. It provoked me immeasurably that girls could be so blind. THE TENTACLES OF THE DEVILFISH 173 "Mr. Gritton has come," said Nan, with a trace of mockery for at least one of us, or both, "to pay his respects to Mr. Ripley." My name had mysteriously interested the stranger, I recalled, but there was no hint of interest in his manner now. With legs apart, sleepily fondling his golden moustache, he surveyed me out of his bulby eyes, and said, "Ah, to be sure," as though he were quite sure that he wasn't sure at all. It made me feel inadequate, inconsequential, and to feel that way before Nan was not pleasant, either. But I was no fit antagonist for this self-centred Briton. Yet who else might dent his shell and touch the flesh and blood man within, if there were a flesh and blood man within ? Could the mocking dare- devil, Bowie? Or the overpowering Houston? Or even the insinuating Santa Ana? Not one of them, I decided. But I had forgotten Nan. Yet I remotely suspect now that she was laughing at him all the time. At least she dominated the situation, and he knew it least of all, and she manipulated the two of us as puppets to suit her whims from one minute to the next. "Mr. Gritton, Harry," she explained affably, "'was able to bring us your horse and saddle." "But not the ah contraband, his ah weapons to be sure, Miss Buckalew." "Certainly not," said Nan, "but if a certain generous young man of my acquaintance appreciates being here instead of in a dungeon up at the fort, he has you to thank, Mr. Gritton. He already knows, though, how you save nearly everybody." This was a shot for me, since she knew how I fumed against the man. But I could not help being thankful to him, and started to tell him so, when she seized the reins again, giving me no chance. "Right this minute," she proceeded mischievously, i 7 4 THE LONE STAR with all the buoyant confidence in herself of the young miss just ready for the world, "right now there would be a half-dozen filthy soldiers quartered on poor Aunt Jane if it wasn't for Oh I tell you what, Harry, it's a mighty good thing to have a friend with the enemy !" And that was certainly a shot for him. "Oh I say now, Miss Buckalew," he drawled, the while indolently appraising her new-blown loveliness, "that cawn't be, y'know. I'm a ah a Texian myself, y'know." His denial, for its very elephantine clumsiness, had the simplicity of truth. But Nan was either very deep, or she had a small suspicious nature. At any rate, she persisted, and the Briton answered; in his dense, lazy way never thinking it possible that his integrity was on trial. He still had ah some credentials. A ah card which had served him when secretary to Colonel Almonte. And if the beastly Mexicans in Goliad took the card to mean that he was still ah Colonel Almonte's secretary, and if they did anything he re- quested for his to be sure his friends, why re-ahly now, a chap hardly felt equal to the exertion of explaining that he was no longer secretary to Colonel Almonte. But it was stupid of them, y'know, very. What more elephantine! Yet with the elephant's sure plodding intelligence behind apparent density! " But how long," promptly demanded the irrepressible Nan, "has Mr. Ripley held a place among your ah friends?" "De-uh me, he is a Texian, isn't he?" "You know well enough he is. And you knew it, too, the other afternoon when they almost killed him, and yet," she added angrily, "you were going to leave him there." THE TENTACLES OF THE DEVILFISH 175 I sat up abruptly, and paid attention. No, this was not a small, suspicious nature that Nan possessed. T,he Briton, however, was in no wise perturbed. "Ah yes, I do recall the incident," he drawled. "But our young friend did not say he was a Texian. An ah Ameri con, I think he said. Then you came, Miss Buckalew, and you called him by name. I had heard that name when Colonel Almonte and I were at ah Gonzales. Almonte was, to tell the truth, waiting for our young friend there. Almonte wanted ah infor- mation, and our young friend was ah obliging, very. It had to do with a letter from to be sure from Mr. Austin, and it ended with that poor chap's imprisonment. Since then I have desired to meet our young friend, and to warn him against future ah indiscretions." He would, in other words, keep me from being here- after the blatant fool I had been. I still felt like one, with Nan looking at me narrowly, and knowing from my shamed expression that the revelation was quite true. "Because you see, Miss Buckalew," the Englishman pursued, as ever lazily taking Nan in from head to foot, "Colonel Almonte had told me that our young friend had been so very ah useful, y'know." "Maybe so," I cried hotly, "but it's the last time, sir!" With legs apart, fondling the golden harp of a mous- tache, he stared at me blankly, as though he had not observed before that I was present. "Ah?" That was all he said. My resolve to be no more a dupe was worth contemplation, was a momentary surcease of boredom. During the months that followed I often recalled his sceptical lifting of the brows as he said, "Ah?" 176 THE LONE STAR i But his interest collapsing at once, he turned again to Nan. "You observe, Miss Buckalew, that the Mexican chain of espionage is a nawsty long one; nawsty, very; and very, very long. It drew our young friend here even into His Excellency's palace. His Excellency was needing another ah spy among the colonists, and fifty square leagues were the ah wages offered." He did not even trouble himself to turn to me for con- firmation. But Nan did, and there was a look on her face as if she were suddenly ill. "But His Excellency," continued Mr. Gritton, "per- ceived that our young friend did not understand." Nan's expression changed gloriously. "Besides, a spy unconscious of the fact would be more serviceable, and- ah cheaper. A little flattery, y'know. Or perhaps a dash of ah intimidation. The latter, I believe, was especially recommended in the case of our young friend by a low person named yes, to be sure named Yandell. But shall we hope, Miss Buckalew, that in future he will not allow himself to be so easily handled?" "As easily," suggested Nan inquiringly, "as when he broke the head of one of your Mexican friends, is that what you mean, Mr. Gritton?" But fury got the best of her, and she turned on me, and this time she did stamp her foot. "Harry," she cried, "why don't you say something? Or must you let a girl " Then she stamped her foot again. I groaned inwardly, though I had been doing that all along. Now I varied it a little, and grinned lugubriously. "Why?" I demanded. "Why, when Mr. Gritton couldn't strike back; that is, not just now?" She saw the force in that, and the burst of fury died out in a pursing of red lips. "Of course not, since THE TENTACLES OF THE DEVILFISH 177 Mr. Gritton knows you're too weak even to stand. Still, he should have remembered that before he said anything. But another time, Harry" Her tone was almost plead- ing "another time you will " She paused expectantly, but I promised nothing. Yet for that pleading in her look I knew within me that another time things would be well, different. Mr. Gritton all along was perfectly oblivious. He helped himself to snuff out of the ruby-jewelled box, crooking his elbow high. He sauntered over to the brasero and peered into the metal pot, slightly jerking his moustache as he recognised the preparations for moulding bullets. "Accordingly," he resumed, as though no human being had spoken since he had last delivered himself, "let us beseech our young friend as a good ah Texian not to let 'em come it over him again. The long chain, or I might say, the ah tentacles of the devil- fish, are even now groping to wind him around, to throttle him for the enemy's service. Even at this ah very moment ! ' ' But I could see nothing more resembling the awful tentacles mentioned than the drooping ends of Mr. Gritton's moustache. And then Nan, with her slender fingers curved ferociously, jumped at me, and said "Boo!" CHAPTER XVIII THE DOZING COLOSSUS OF RHODES EVEN Nan was convinced now of Mr. Gritton's loyalty to Texas, and in all fairness I was too, though grudgingly. To doubt him after he had warned me against the Mexican spy system would be unreason- able. He did not do it in a very palatable way, true enough, but that was the more compelling evidence of his good faith. He had explained, too, his rather remarkable influence over the Mexican authorities, but even any lingering suspicions on this score were to be dispelled. This happened the next day. Though fully dressed, I had given way to the luxury of my couch, when there came the pounding of the butt of a sword on the heavy wooden street door. A moment later Mrs. Long entered the room. "Well, they're here/' she announced resign- edly, and close behind her appeared a half-dozen swart leering faces. They shuffled in, rilling the room with the odour of their bodies, and lined up against the wall. He who commanded the squad was a narrow-breasted lieutenant in cocked hat and soiled yellow cloak. The cocked hat was in his hand, and his black porcupine hair oozed bear grease. The hair lay back flat and straight on his wedge-shaped head, so that head and hair and grease, combined with two little eyes, re- minded one disgustingly of a drowned rat. He was accompanied by a person yet more insignificant, a per- son in dandruff-sprinkled black, who had a corn-husk cigarette thrust handily over one ear and a ragged 178 THE DOZING COLOSSUS OF RHODES 179 blank book clutched importantly in one hand. We were not long in discovering that he was a commis- sariat clerk. I got to my feet, supposing they had come for me, but I might have known that that could not be, else the dear old lady would not have admitted them so readily. "They're only taking the inventory," she explained. But the pomaded lieutenant resented her off-hand tone as lacking in awe for his high duties. "Si,senora," he spoke up offensively, "an inventory of all that one possesses, that he or she may pay one per cent, on the total every twenty days for war taxes. But you, senora, have not done sent in your inventory, and you must therefore pay three per cent, and costs. This bed now," and he nodded to the dingy black crow of a commissariat clerk, "oh, put it down at a hundred re ales." The crude old four-poster that had been my comfort was not worth half as much, but these harpies were bent on tortuous confiscation. I was so bitten with the injustice of it, yet so helpless, that I would have forgiven even Mr. Gritton any source of influence to drive them out. "Neither, senora'' the greasy officer accused her solemnly, as of high treason, "have you yet sent us your first janega of corn." Then Nan entered. Nan was in filmy blue, and there were white satin slippers whose ribbons crossed over her ankles. Also, the roses flushed red under the tan of her cheeks, but the exuberance of life changed to a contemptuous quivering of the nostrils as she tossed aside her bonnet and surveyed the intruders. It was easy to understand why Old Man Buckalew uncon- sciously accepted her as the generalissimo of the family. i8o THE LONE STAR "Corn?" she repeated. "But we feed beggars, senores, at the back door." The frowsy little officer and the frowsy little clerk quailed visibly before the black-eyed maid. Yet the odour of unclean flesh emanating from the squad at their backs was for them the celestial breath of courage. Subtly, too, it buoyed them to the height of desire. You could read their filthy little souls in their eyes as they looked on the girl. "Yes, senorita mia, corn," said the drowned rat, emu- lating a dashing winsomeness, "and it must be ground, also. But the old senora shall relieve you of that labour." Indian-like, he did not once connect me, a man, with the grinding of corn. Nan had some trouble getting his preposterous mean- ing into her head. But slowly the red spread to her temples, and over her brow to the roots of her hair, where the skin was purest white. Mrs. Long drew near her, and touched her arm timidly, pacifyingly, as I had seen Nan's father do once before. Nan did not have the pistol at her girdle now, being a young lady grown, but the hand of the arm that Mrs. Long laid hold on so anxiously was at her bosom, hidden in the folds of her dress. As for myself, I forgot that I was as weak as a kitten, yet I had no weapon, and was entirely at sea besides. Romantic imagination would prescribe some- thing decisive as due from me, but what? The question found no answer. It was the more galling, too, that 'the damsel in the case was so self-sufficient; and more galling yet when Mr. Gritton sauntered in just then and took the whole matter on his own shoulders. As lethargic as ever, the Briton was yet comprehended into the situation as understandingly as though he had been there from the first. He even read rightly the THE DOZING COLOSSUS OF RHODES 181 prurient thirst in the rat's beady eyes, in the dingy crow's restive breathing; not that he roused himself to indignation, but propped on his outspread legs in the manner of a dozing Rhodesian Colossus, his right elbow in his left hand, his right thumb and forefinger thus held up to their task of nursing the golden moustache, he stared sleepily on a line with the two dignitaries, as though they were curiosities possibly, and he would concentrate his attention on them now directly to make quite sure about it. "Oh, ah, these men," and he sniffed painfully, lifting his chin to indicate the redolent squad. "It is no use, senor," said the lieutenant, "we know now that you are no longer secretary to Colonel Almonte." "But these men?" said Mr. Gritton faintly. "No use, I say. You are no longer secretary to Colonel Almonte." Mr. Gritton changed his right hand to his left elbow, and stroked the golden harp with the left thumb and forefinger. "Ah?" he said. "But" His mind was still on the afflictive squad. "No longer secretary to Colonel Almonte," mumbled the lieutenant. "Now re-ahly, my good fellow," said Mr. Gritton wearily, "is that any reason why you should not post- pone this-ah domiciliary visit until to-morrow?" His logic was irresistible. Drowned rat and dingy crow turned to leave. "But ah, these men?" said Mr. Gritton, fearing the squad would be left behind like a forgotten package. But he did not uproot his legs as the lieutenant pointed to the door with his sword, and they all filed out. He was oblivious to them henceforth. 1 8a THE LONE STAR "But to-morrow," said Mrs. Long, "to-morrow they will come again." "And they can postpone it again, I reckon," said Nan. "Oh I'm afraid they won't, dear. They might not listen to Mr. Gritton a second time, now that they've found him out. And who knows, their next insult " But she had no need to go on. We all knew what turn the next insult might take. "Why," I asked, "why can't you leave this place to-night?" "Ha, that's a jolly idea, y' know," said Gritton, shaking a pinch of snuff a careful distance from his dazzling vest. "What I should propose myself, if-ah," he added concisely, "I had thought of it." "But," protested Mrs. Long, "Harry is too weak yet to " "We'll not go," declared Nan. There was just so much emotion as a quick little scowl of impatience between Gritton's bulby eyes. "If you don't go," I announced, "then I'll I'll give myself up at the fort." The Englishman wheeled and stared at me gloomily. Well, after all, it was a silly declaration, because if they wanted me at the fort, they knew where I was, and had only to come after me. "De-uh me, it's a triviality." But whether Gritton meant me or their objection to going, I am not certain "Our young friend will not be disturbed, I assure you. I gave them his name, y' see, and they know that His Excellency has further ah use for him." "I'll risk that," I retorted, "and meantime I'll accept His Excellency's protection while these two women get clear of His Excellency's soldiers." Mr. Gritton rather imagined that he could buy up the sentinels, and the next day he and the two women THE DOZING COLOSSUS OF RHODES 183 would be safe among the settlements. Also, the while regarding Nan appreciatively, he volunteered to escort them there. Then Mrs. Long, with a terror of drowned rats and black crows on the girl's account, overcame every remaining objection. The matter was no sooner decided than Nan, in her own eager, self-reliant way, began getting ready to leave. I, using a cane, hobbled around the house after her, trying to keep her in sight, for it loomed up as important that I should see a great deal of her now, since she was going away that very evening, and when we should meet again looked more indefinite than most things even in Texas. The Rhodesian Colossus planted in the middle of the room watched her too from under his long sandy lashes, while she and Mrs. Long filled their saddle bags with corn pone and tasso. It never occurred to him to help them, except when it occurred to Nan, and then she would bring him out of his trance in mighty quick time. "Oh, I nearly forgot," she cried; and rushed into the kitchen. She came back filling a deerskin wallet with the bullets she had moulded. "Now then, under the feather-bed they go," and I helped her tuck the bag away. "When Daddy comes," she whispered to me, "you give them to him." They were to set out at nightfall. Mr. Gritton, in scarlet coat et al. which no one could admire in the darkness, though that made not the least difference to him stopped before the house with pack horses and mules and a retinue of servants. The retinue loaded chests and baskets on the animals by the light of torches, and the town's population gathered round, and altogether it was a very queer manner of stealthy escape. But Mr. Gritton, as usual, was unaware of the earth's being inhabited. He merely sat on his horse, i8 4 THE LONE STAR combed his moustache with the ivory handle of his crop, and waited. I and a servant helped Mrs. Long to her big rocking-chair description of a Mexican saddle, while Nan jumped into hers, which was silver-mounted and had a bear skin for a blanket. I remember Mrs. Long putting her hand on my bare head in farewell, though not what she said, but I do remember all that Nan said, which was no more than: "Now don't get careless, Harry, and let them hurt you." But she said it in that softer voice of hers that I had heard the other afternoon when I keeled over. "No fear, I assure you, Miss Buckalew," said Gritton, peering for a glimpse of the face set so alluringly deep in her bonnet. "No fear, re-ahly. The long tentacle for the ah for the present, wraps our young friend as snug as a baby in a sheepskin." "Mr. Gritton," I began hotly, resolved to make him address me personally, or else not refer to me at all, but Nan had her hand on my shoulder. "Harry, Harry," she scolded gently. Was it a kindly warning that I made but a wry figure at repartee, or did her half-laugh, and half-tender it was too, mean that she thought I was jealous? But one or the other, or both, this Briton would have to admit yet that I did exist. It was not too much to expect of one's fellow man. And, as if in answer to that thought, as well as in farewell, she said, "Another time, Harry, another time." With which she jerked her bridle a little, and her horse obediently clattered away down the narrow street. The rest of the cavalcade went clattering behind her, and when only the torches could be seen, I turned back into the lonely house.with nothing to do but wait and test the protective qualities of the long tentacle; or better, to think on a face set alluringly deep in a flowered bonnet. CHAPTER XIX TAKING INVENTORY NOW I should like to hurry to where we shall see Nan again, just as at the time I tried to galvanise the leaden hours into chariot steeds for exactly the same purpose. But hours spiced with leaden bullets may not be lightly skipped, and besides, as Old Man Buckalew says, they are heaps more enjoyable as a reminiscence. Alone in the old clean house, I barred the street door, and wished for company. Even L'fitte would have seemed a crowd, and Lagniappe a multitude. I prac- tised walking up and down through the rooms, to see if I could do without my cane. It was physical pleasure to feel the blood coursing warmly, and to imagine it permeating every tissue with strength and life. After- ward I slept luxuriously till morning, only to turn over and sleep more luxuriously yet, with conscience at ease in the assurance that the longer I dozed the more time the vital fluid would have to build and repair. But hunger got me up at last. The blood, you see, needed replenishment for its blessed alchemy, and never was a debt of gratitude paid with more liking. Those were mighty good biscuits that Mrs. Long had left, requiring only to be heated, and they went prime with bacon and eggs and coffee, and then with golden-drip molasses. Pedestrianism and delicious cat-naps alternated through- out the rest of the day, and after stoking up the faithful blood again at supper time, I was beginning to feel that better than bed, better than biscuits, would be a race 185 186 THE LONE STAR like the wind astride my horse, or a wrestling bout in some mighty cause, or any other brave tonic. And then the pommel of a sword crashed against the front door, and there were the filthy-souled lieutenant, the filthy-souled clerk, and their purveyors of Dutch cour- age, the ethereally scented squad. "The inventory," explained the drowned rat, and in they shuffled. They took no notice that Nan was not there. Of course, they must have known of her flight, and so they had eaten out their chagrin, and bowed to events with the servility they gave to all things superior, which were very many indeed. I followed them as they went through the house about their work, and my craving for exercise grew to a passion, taking the form of wondering what kind of an explosion would result if the skull of a drowned rat and the skull of a dingy crow were knocked together. For me this was a daring fancy, but then, they had looked at Nan. Taking inventory was only perfunctory now. Evi- dently they had something weightier on their minds. At last the crow pecked down the last item in his ragged blank book, and then the rat, with a relish that was inexpressibly mean, said: "Now, compadre, for the bullets!" They meant Nan's little contribution to the cause of Texas. There had been spies hovering near the windows, they said, and they had seen her hide a wallet filled with bullets. On discovery of the contraband the intruders would confiscate everything in the house, and that signi- fied prize money for them. The lieutenant came to the bed, and lifted the corner of the mattress. All at once there was something pathetic in the absent girl and the widow being despoiled of the mite they gave for our freedom, but not knowing how to protest adequately, TAKING INVENTORY 187 I simply sat down hard on the bed. The lieutenant jerked back his hand, grabbed up his precious sword, and demanded what I meant. "I I think I'm tired," and I fetched a sigh of utter weariness, or of pain from newly healed wounds, as you may prefer. Now was a fair chance to test the benevolence of devilfish. And certainly an invisible tentacle reached from the Palacio in Mexico across sierras and valleys and deserts and plains, and into this room, and held back the sword at my breast. The rat knew a change in his little mur- derous oyster of a heart. "Do you mean, senor," he cried, "do you mean that you wish to faint? But have the goodness, senor, not there! No, be not that inconsiderate! " But as I gave signs of being even that inconsiderate, the ethereal perfumers were called into requisition. Two caught hold of each wrist, and pulled. I laid my weight back on the bed, and they pulled harder. They pulled too hard, for I landed abruptly on my feet, and they all sprawled over on the floor. The watery oyster heart instantly spelled Murder into Justification, and at me its possessor came with his sword. But I grabbed the blade, and kicked him a handsome one on the shin, so that he let go. I had a vague idea of spanking him next, being in too great a huff to think of what the squad might do meantime, but there was a furtive rapping at the door, and who should steal in but Old Man Buckalew and two other Americans; which naturally laid over the spanking and my own killing as unfinished business. The newcomers had their rifles at their hips, but that was not necessary. The sweat rolled out from the lieutenant's oily hair, and the little clerk thrust his lighted cigarette behind his ear, and had a chill in his i88 THE LONE STAR dingy black coat until the cigarette burned him, when he let out a terrific howl, thinking he was killed already. The squad merely waited stolidly for their leader to order them to shoot, and be killed. But their leader entertained no such phantasy. "Where's Nan?" demanded Buckalew. "Where's W'y, if there ain't young Rip! Quick, tell me, boy, Where's the girl? Where's Nan?" I told him as fast as I could, for he already had a strand of his shaggy moustache doubled between his teeth, and the mild hazel eyes behind the tortoise-shell spectacles were piteous in their anxiety. "And," I added, bringing forth the wallet of bullets, "here's a keepsake she left for you." "Ha, bless the little catamou't!" and he held the prize aloft as though it were a sack of gold. "Ha, that girl of mine, she knows that a scrape without bullets is like roast pork and no apple sauce. Here, Ben, you shall have them, and now you can lead the chorus." The man he called Ben was woefully haggard and ragged. The gray dust of the mesquite flats caked on his fleshless chest and limbs was streaked with the dried blood brought by cacti thorns. His wrists and bare ankles showed the callous grooves left by chains. He was hollow-eyed, his cheeks were sunken, his body emaciated, but his heavy brows were the brows of an indomitable man. Even in his wretched state the mouth was dimpled in and upward at the corners as if he were waiting for the point of a good story to laugh outright. He wore Buckalew's cape coat, and in that he looked the toughened military veteran. "For you, Ben," repeated Buckalew, making him take the wallet. "Lordy, though, wouldn't your jailer friends back in Monterey feel good if they knew you had a gun this minute and some of Nan's pills! Now TAKING INVENTORY 189 wouldn't they, and that in ten minutes more you'll be whooping it against their old Goliad rockpile! Bully for the little catamou't You're sure she's safe, Rip?" He wanted to be crusty, but his high state of excite- ment was too much for him. The third man, a settler in buckskin and moccasins from Matagorda, was just as bad, and their spirits were so infectious that I began to get excited with them. There was grim purpose at bottom, but there was joy too, and that was centred in the haggard, indomitable man called Ben. Every minute Buckalew called him Ben again, to make real sure that he was there, and if Buckalew had been a Frenchman, he must have hugged Ben in the way of climax to each attack. "Now then," he grumbled, as hearty and crabbed and whole-souled as could be, "we know about Nan, so let's get to work. Here's young Rip, and he'll come too, and that'll make us forty-eight altogether." I knew their errand, but I recoiled. Did he mean, I asked, that forty-eight of us were going to assault that massive-walled fortress on the hill in which three hun- dred and fifty Americans had once held off two thousand Spaniards? "That don't noways matter," exclaimed the old fellow, sniffing derision, "for wasn't Ben with us on the inside then? And ain't he with us on the outside now? Here, you may tan my ear choice of ears too for a sow's purse if Ben don't take us slap dash right in, lock, stock, and barrel!" Faith, in that humour he alone would have been enough for the massive-walled fort! "And contrary -wise," he added, his eyes twinkling craftily, "Ben can get outside same as he gets inside, like this last time at Monterey, eh Ben? Oh he ain't any fly in a tar pot, that can't get out, are you, Ben? i 9 o THE LONE STAR I tell you what, Ben," he cried, giving way to another attack on his old crony, "we're sure tickled plaguy well to death over finding you. But I can't believe it yet. I can't, Ben, honest!" Ben, Ben, Ben! Who was Ben, anyhow? The Mata- gorda man's face also glowed for Ben. And Ben's mouth, turning up at the corners, changed the suffering in Ben's gaunt features to boyish fun and daredeviltry. But who was he? Who could he be? "W'y here, young Rip," said Buckalew querulously, "you don't seem to appreciate that this is Colonel Ben Milam right in front of you. Make you acquainted." Then I understood, and wondered no longer. I was not hardened even yet to meeting my childhood's heroes in the flesh and blood, and my emotions were keen as I gazed on the actual living Ben Milam. With his own Kentuckians Milam fought through the War of, 1812. Also he had fought through the wars for Mexican inde- pendence. And this was his reward, the marks of chains. During twenty years he had languished in nearly every prison from the Inquisition to the Rio Grande, all because he would not accept riches from this or that despot. More recently General Cos had found him in Coahuila, and imprisoned him at Monterey. But he had escaped, as usual, skulking by night through hundreds of miles of scrub-oak desert, and just this very night the men with Buckalew had found him crouching miserably in the cacti near Goliad. Milam thought at first that they were Mexicans, but a spoken word in the dark gave him to understand that they were his own people. "Now Buck," said Milam, smiling tolerantly on his old friend, "we came, you know, to get a guide that knows the lay of the fort and how they're fixed up there since our day. Who'll we get?" We pondered dubiously. TAKING INVENTORY igi "Here," I said, "what's the matter with the drowned rat?" "Who?" they asked, and I nodded to the perspiring lieutenant. "But he's a Mexican. Look at his uniform," the Matagorda man objected. "Don't matter," said Milam. "Young Rip is right. I know young Rip must be right, having known his father. We'll take the Mexican. You can see with one hand tied behind you that he don't want to be shot, and he'll be our guide. So come along uh Ratsy." And Lieutenant Ratsy was drafted forthwith. Books and imagination, but I am long on poetic justice! They would scare him into it, in the very way the devilfish proposed that I should be made useful. As Davy Crockett might say, it was beating 'em with their own cudgel. "Now Ratsy," and Milam took him by the neck and lifted him from the floor. The lieutenant's little eyes Were bobbing like buoys in the streaming sweat of his face, and in terror he dropped his sword. "There, there," said Milam, "pick up your toy. We shall want you to salute the pickets with it on the way. And you, young Rip, where's your gun?" "They took it, colonel, as soon as I reached town." Milam's dark brows knitted impatiently. Why explain so much, when I had only to help myself from the car- bines of the Mexican squad, who were already disarmed? "Ready, boys?" and Milam's voice was ringing, inspiriting. He led the way, and stealthily we crept through the dark ravine-like alleys of the town, and on down to the river by the ford, where in the trees and brush the others of the forty -eight were waiting for us. CHAPTER XX THE WATERY OYSTER HEART THERE was plenty of noise, a glorious infernal din. Muskets cracked on every side, and there were blinding flashes in the dark, and yells, and shrieks for mercy. History has not made too much of that night by any means. But allowing for the sheer daring and the daring of it was the Big Thing once allowing for that, and the rest came easy. Not a Texan there would care to boast of it, and yet one feels good to have History come out so handsomely about it afterward. But you see, the Big Thing, the daring, was lacking on the other side, and in spite of odds and thick stone walls, we could not help but feel that somehow or somewhere we did not know exactly what but that somehow we had the advantage. It was an experience for me all right, that stealing around the edge of town, and climbing the hill, and lastly the pause under the walls in the silent night just before Hell broke loose. If our fellows had known of my convalescent state, they would have counted me in with the group that stayed behind at the ford to guard the horses and Ratsy's inventory squad. But though I anticipated exactly how I should feel during the tense perilous moments of that harrowing attack in the dark, yet I could not bring myself to reveal the newly healed slash in my side. If I were brave, I might have done so. But I was not brave enough. For I knew, or feared, that my motive would be to evade my part in the night's business, and that they would think so too. 192 THE WATERY OYSTER HEART 193 Hence it happened that even I was one of that hand- ful of Texans to creep up Goliad hill that night, but wishing, just the same, that the October Gulf breeze were a mite colder on my brow, for the sweat was there, though once my teeth chattered. "Now will you stop it!" I hissed fiercely, and clenched my jaws hard and tight. But frailty like that made me kinder, and I pitied poor Ratsy, who tottered between Milam and Buckalew, with a pistol at his head. I envied the buoyant eagerness in the puffing of the men around me, especially in those two old cronies, Milam and Buckalew. Fifteen years ago, previous to being besieged by the Span- iards, they had scaled this very hill for this very purpose, except that they were doing it then for the Mexicans whom now they had to fight. But these two had no such thoughts. "I tell you what, Ben," Buckalew was chatting away in a low tone, " I had the biggest yield this fall! When once you get hold o' the right seed cawn " "For God's sake", shut up back there," our captain whispered savagely. "Oh you go to the devil, George," Buckalew retorted, and men laughed softly at both him and the captain, and neither got mad. We reached the summit without an alarm or challenge, and drew up before the heavy wooden doors of the old mission church. This church was built into the fortifica- tions, with a bastion at each corner, and through it one gained entrance to the compound and barracks within. That was the intensest moment of all, that moment in front of the church, under the cross we could not see. The dead quiet and black of midnight contrasted terrifyingly with the half-acknowledged certainty that cannon, like sluggish monsters, thrust their muzzles at us over the battlements ; that just within, quietly dreaming i 9 4 THE LONE STAR now, were scores of armed Mexicans. Two planters from the banks of the Caney unslung their axes, and for a second held them poised. And then and this was the worst of all that night on frazzled nerves there was that eternity of a second before the whispered command: "Now!" Then the axes crashed into the splintering wood, and with the crash the thing was on. But it was relief, glorious relief, the relief from one's thoughts. In the uproar I cried at them frantically to strike harder, harder. It infuriated me because the doors would not yield at once, and I hurled my weight against those doors, and beat at them with my carbine stock, until Buckalew dragged me away. A sentinel yelled within. Feet pattered across the courtyard. There was a shot, then more yells and more shots, and steadily the din rose. At its height the doors fell in, and in we pushed and scrambled, cursing one another to make way, firing at flashes, on through the church, on into the great courtyard, and firing as we came. Half-dressed men dimly seen were running everywhere, blazing away at us, then thinking better of it and darting off, to shrink in dark corners, or to climb the walls and drop outside. Near me I heard Milam's ringing voice. "Here Ratsy, where 's the commandant's room?" He had the quaking Ratsy by the collar, and a pistol at his ear. What if I were in Ratsy 's place, what. . . But I prayed God to let me die rather than face a test like that. "Where, you toad?" "This way, senor," whined the Mexican, "This way." I loathed Ratsy for that. Yet if I were in his place. We were at a closed door. An axe swung, and down went the door. A candle flickered in the cell-like room. THE WATERY OYSTER HEART I9 5 and a dazed man in shirt sleeves was tying round him the red scarf of a colonel, forgetting that red scarfs were not important. At sight of this man something came over Ratsy. "My colonel," he shrieked, "the Americans! They are the Americans, my colonel!" And shrieking ever, he twisted free, leaped ahead, turned, and rushed upon us with his naked sword. But he fell at once, blood besmearing grease and sweat, stone dead. "Oh!" gasped Milam. Yet I was glad that Ratsy did just that. I was grateful to him for it. What followed was perfunctory. We had the fort, prisoners, immense military stores, and a beautiful view. We held the gateway to Texas, and it had cost us only so many drops as flowed from one grazed shoulder. The Mexicans, colonel, scarf, captains, and all, were locked in the church and a guard set over them, though the colonel first placed his cognac supply at our disposal, and we toasted the night's work in regular fashion. Old Man Buckalew began pottering around among chests and casks with a forlorn expression, and at last con- fessed that just possibly he might encounter a "church- warden." What was the sense, he grumbled, of captur- ing a rockpile of Mex'cans that didn't have a "church- warden" among them? But in the end he had recourse to his saddle wallet of otter skin, which carried his steel and flint and tobacco, and he drew from it an old clay pipe bowl with two inches of stem. This he charged and lighted, and stretched himself on the alfalfa which we had laid over the courtyard for bedding. Ben Milam joined him here. Milam had washed the grime and stains from his body, and he had shaved and changed his clothes, and now he looked the gallant Kentuckian that he was, with the marks of past suffering only giving him greater distinction, with that boyish upturn of the i 9 6 THE LONE STAR mouth that made him lovable, and with that ringing timbre in his voice that made men eager to fight, if he but led them. He lay down on the fodder to sleep safely for the first time in weeks; and alfalfa, he reckoned, was heaps better than the chaparral. "Twenty years of fighting for 'em, Buck," he said, ' ' and not a red copper in my pocket. ' ' Absent-mindedly he rubbed the livid scars on his wrists. "But no matter, I paid myself back this night. I'm paid now. Good- night, then, old porcupine, and sleep hearty." They were soon breathing as deeply and peacefully as babes, while I was yet all excitement. But I lay down too, and then my muscles, my very heart, suddenly relaxed, and I perceived that I was dead tired. The light of day was yet a gray mist within the high old walls when I opened my eyes to see Milam and Buckalew pulling on their boots, and our men bending over fires getting breakfast. "I'm 'most afraid," Milam was saying, "that Austin will bag General Cos at San Antone before we get there, and I'd like real well to officiate, seeing how the Cuss bagged me in Coahuila." Old Man Buckalew sniffed through his pugnacious nose. "But there's Nan, Ben," he objected. "First off, I've got to see if she's safe at Gonzales." "Sure you do. And besides, the rest of us will have to stay here and hold the fort." "Not I, Colonel, I hope," I broke in on them. "I that is well, I'd like to go along with Mr. Buckalew." The old man blinked at me behind the tortoise-shells, and Milam looked whimsically first at one and then the other of us. "By the way, Buck," he said, "that little wildcat you've harboured all these years, she must be a spank- ing fine young lady by now, eh?" THE WATERY OYSTER HEART 197 "Ask him" said Buck, jerking his head at me, "he saw her last." The old fellow must have satisfied any remaining doubts with that, for of course I had to turn as red as possible, a very painful turkey-red before those two sharp pairs of eyes. An earthquake would have proved welcome interrup- tion, but an invasion at that moment answered as well. The invaders were being greeted most jubilantly, too. They were one hundred more Texans, who had been detached from our little Army of the People at Gon- zales. They had marched south to repel an attack on Victoria, but the Mexicans not waiting for them to arrive, they had come on to help take Goliad, and very glum they were to find that they were just too late. They quickly shook off the dumps, however, with trying to shake off the bony hand of Ben Milam. "You fellows from Gonzales, you say?" asked Bucka- lew. "Then maybe you passed my daughter Nan on the way down?" They caught the anxious note in the query, but could only shake their heads. Buckalew began strapping on his pistols. "And them Mex'cans, which way did they go from Victoria? " "Wy, back to San Antone, of course." "Then they've got her, that's all! And Mrs. Long, too!" "Well, and what then? Mexicans aren't Indians, Buck, and women won't be hurt." "And," said another, "ain't we going to San Antone next, and won't we find 'em?" "But Cos is there," groaned the old man. "And Cos is father-in-law or something to that dam' Sant' Ana." " Sakes alive, man, what's that got to do with it? " 1 98 THE LONE STAR But Milam took Buckalew by the arm and drew him into the seclusion of a cannon port. On the way he looked back, and nodded for me to join them. "Now," he said, when we three were out of hearing, "what on earth can Sant' Ana have to do with all this? He's off in Mexico." "But he got me on the list just the same," said Buck- alew, "and that ain't easy to understand either. If Cos there in San Antone should find out who Nan is Lord, O Lord!" "Santa Ana," I interrupted, for this thing must be told, "got it out of me about your still being in Texas, and at once he suspected that you had been telling that story of yours about the Battle on the Medina, which accounts for a man like Santa Ana putting you on the list." "Yes, yes, the story, you mean, about how he took me prisoner, but" and here Buckalew's eyes narrowed on me with suspicion "but did your dam' Sant' Ana say anything about about how I got away from him? " "Not a word, sir." He saw that I was telling the truth, and the savage light so unusual in the mild old eyes gave way to anguish again. "Now by all that's baffling," demanded Milam, "how can your getting away from Sant' Ana twenty years ago have anything to do with Nan now, who wasn't even born yet?" "Oh iceep shut, Ben!" snapped the old man, and turned on me. "Well, well," he fumed, "and what did Sant' Ana say?" "It was more the way he looked," I replied. "When he recalled your name, and then the story, he looked well, tigerish." "And then?" THE WATERY OYSTER HEART 199 "Why, after a minute his expression changed again, this time glossy and sensuous like, and " "Go on, boy, go on!" "And he asked about about your wife." For a moment I thought Buckalew would strike me. "Nan's mother," he muttered. "Well, what next?" "Well, that's just what I said, sir, when he inquired about 'the little senora? 'You mean Nan's mother?' I asked him, for it came naturally, and I couldn't think he intended any harm. But then he wanted to know about Nan too, and if she was was like her mother." The old man's teeth crunched together as of some poor wretch in delirium. "Boy, boy!" he groaned. "But no, it's not your fault. No, I will know it ain't, when it's all over. But I can't forgive you. now. I can't, I can't, not until my girl, not until Nan's mother's baby girl is in my arms again. Lord, Lord, and them Mex'cans have put back for San Antone!" "There, there, Buck," said Milam. "We're going to San Antone now, and as we tear down the town, we'll get her. And young Rip Buck, look at this poor boy, he's that white, you'd think he'd stepped on his mother's grave But he's going with us, ain't you, Rip?" I nodded tearfully, gratefully. CHAPTER XXI BOUQUETS WITH THORNS EIGHTY men had to stay behind and garrison the fort, though they did not like to a bit, and the rest of us started at a gallop for San Antonio to join Austin and the Army of the People, who should be there by now and besieging the town. The next morning, while we were still moving in a cloud of grayish dust across the plum-coloured desert, with scrubby post-oak and thorny nopals hiding the view, there came to our ears a faint booming sound. Men looked at each other, and those who had heard that sound before put spurs to their horses with the eager- ness of children fearful of being late for a circus. But to the rest of us it was a thing so often imagined as to have grown into a myth long since, with no chance of being actually real. Yet the whole significance of which that faint booming was an epitome broke on me when Nan's father turned in his saddle to Milam, and when his lips trembled to form words, and when the words came: "Nan Nan is there!" The myth was real enough then. Where the shells screeched in air, where they fell, there Nan was! Whereupon my jaded horse, and every jaded horse, made thicker the choking dust, until little tufts of green began to dot the alkali, and the cacti fell away, and the country changed to an open prairie of high waving mesquite grass. Away off to the northwest, where the dancing heat waves marked a bend in the little San BOUQUETS WITH THORNS 201 Antonio River, we saw what looked like a jumble of coloured blocks that a child had spilt on the skyline. Yet every once in a while a puff of cotton-white burst in midair, and there always followed the booming sound ; only it was no longer faint, but deep-toned and ominous. We were approaching a besieged city. The thing had to be credited. Buckalew would have kept straight on into the town itself, but while yet a good distance away Milam turned us from the road toward an old mill a half-mile or so northeast. Then we perceived that there were little white specks clustered around the mill, and as we came plunging through the untrodden grass we saw that these were tents, and that men, a thousand or more, were scattered over the plain there. They seemed to have no uniforms, and the ruddy tinge of white men's blood showed in their tanned necks and faces. They were not Mexicans. They were Americans. They were not fighting particularly. They might rather have been lounging about in the various lazy sports of a picnic. For this was a siege, not a battle, that we had come upon. I was irritated at first because they destroyed the illusion of actual warfare. And yet, when the next sphere of cotton- white puffed up over the town, I myself could not take it seriously as meaning human destruction, nor yet the black missile singing and soaring overhead, which fell short and went ricochetting toward the tents. The men did not regard it, either, as more than a part of their field sports. Eight or ten of them began to run, leisurely, calculatingly, to inter- cept the thing in its spiritless bounds. The man nearest held out his hand to catch it, but in an instant decided not to, and jerked back his hand. The projectile went skipping past him, and rose to the hand of a second man, and I thought he had it, but he spun round and round 202 THE LONE STAR till he fell, while the Army of the People laughed. Fifty yards beyond, as the ball curved up in its long sweep, a tall athletic fellow leaped high, throwing up his arms. His hands closed over the ball, and the force hurled him backward a half-dozen steps, but he did not fall, and when he recovered himself, he threw his capture to the ground. "A four-pounder," he called, and others ran and picked up the ball, and soon they were ramming it into a cannon. You see, they had to catch their ammunition first. The splendid athlete for whom cannon balls were toys was Jim Bowie. By now we were surrounded and welcomed as so many more revellers at the picnic. But when the news raced as wildfire that we had taken Goliad, which meant that Cos was isolated in San Antonio and at their mercy, the shouts went to our heads like wine. For old Ben Milam, whom they thought in prison yet, it was an ovation, and he and Buckalew were gathered to the arms of veteran comrades, and nearly had their joints wrenched loose. It all gave me that lonely fish-out-of-water sensation of not-belonging-and-wanting-to that I had known as a freshman on Freshman Sunday; only a hundred times worse. But the freshman class is always the largest, at any rate, and I had plenty of com- pany in the youngsters crowding around us to wor- ship the veterans. Many of these youngsters scarcely had their first coat of tan yet, and there was a sprink- ling of them in natty uniforms the only uniforms in the Army of the People and I wondered who they could be. "Hi thar, ef here ain't one o' the 'Valientes of Gon- zales!"' Before I could turn round, I knew that the grizzly old misanthrope, Jack Castleman, was behind me. BOUQUETS WITH THORNS 203 "How, what's that?" demanded an eager boyish voice. "What's that you say, sir, a 'Valiente' of Gon- zales?" It was not an angel's voice this time, but for all that it set my heartstrings to trembling, and brought the tears to my eyes with memories of home. I flung myself from my saddle, and even as I touched the ground I had my arms about the youngster who had asked the question. For he was my brother, my baby brother that I had left behind in Louisiana. But the spirit of that daring little rogue of fourteen now tugged at its bounds in the frame of a man. "Yes, that's him, I jedge," said Jack Castleman, "an* he's one o' the 'Valientes of Gonzales, ' all right." Thus the old misanthrope I wish his was the pattern for all misanthropes! had brought us together. But the awed admiration in my brother's eyes had no recognition in it, and he was terribly embarrassed to have a begrimed buckskin specimen like myself pounce on him and hug him like a bear. ' ' Why, petit bb, toi!" I cried, using on him the endear- ment of our old negro mammy. * Instantly his fists doubled up, just as they used to when they were soft and chubby, and I laughed almost to crying to think that he would pitch into me, twice his weight and strength. But as I laughed, his eyes grew big and round. "Harry!" he burst out, and then was his turn to do the hugging. "But you, Phil," I said, "what in the world " " Oh, I am one of the Grays," he announced, as solemn as an owl. I knew then that I was not altogether a freshman, for only freshmen are as solemn as owls when announcing their new estate. "The Grays, Phil?" I did not understand. 2o 4 THE LONE STAR "Yes, two companies of us. Just got here from New Orleans, and we've come to help, along with some others from Mississippi. Lots more coming too, I reckon, from the way the whole United States is holding Texas meetings. Father subscribed to buy hollow ware cannons, you know," he explained kindly, "but when I wanted to come too, why mother " He had to pause, but he scowled manfully, lest I suspect that he was not a gnarled and bearded old campaigner. "And mother?" I prompted. "Never mind," he said, batting his eyes. "They all sent messages, of course. Even," he added with inimitable condescension, "even Rosalie." "Rosalie?" "Yes, don't you remember? But you must try not to mind it, Harry, too much. She hadn't seen you for so long, you know, and well I the fact is, Harry, I'm afraid that I went and and cut you out, and I'm going to send her my first button off a colonel's uniform." And this, from my baby brother! "But Lordy me, Harry," he rattled on, to save my feelings, no doubt, "who'd* a' known you! You're as brown well, I took you for one of these regular Indian killers around here. Hey, you fellows," and as ardent as a freshman pointing out each renowned campus hero to his classmen, he drew all those other natty youngsters around us. "Hey, this is Harry!" he proclaimed, striving to bear his honours easily. Then our old neighbours, or rather, the baby brothers of old neighbours, overwhelmed me, and roared messages and greetings till it was like an avalanche of precious pearls. Any single one of those pearls would have gladdened a week for me. "You all know," said Phil, "that he's one of the 'Valientes.' " BOUQUETS WITH THORNS 205 "Now once for all," I interrupted, "who are the 'Valientes'?" "Why, they're what the Mexicans call the Eighteen, you know, who saved the cannon at Gonzales. The San Felipe Telegraph was full of it, and our papers home; and mother, she had to go and crumble up all over the house and just cry, she was so proud. There's your cannon over there now, and it's the only one we got, except the four-pounder Colonel Bowie captured the other day. The Mexicans thought they had him sure, caught him way off alone with only ninety men, and they had four hundred, cavalry, batteries, everything. But shucks, it didn't take him more'n thirty minutes to drive 'em back to town, and now they don't dare poke their noses out. But you, Harry, you started the whole shindy, you " I stopped him short. It was incense, the determined idolising of these tender youngsters, but I couldn't allow it. They would be finding out soon enough how mis- taken they were. "Now look here, Phil," I began severely, "as for being one of the Eighteen, I didn't " "But whut he did do," interrupted Jack Castleman, his lips set hard in the vinegar of contradiction, "was to slam a purty captin o' draggins over in the river an' keep the Mex'kins on their own side." "And," said a big soft-voiced man, who was Major Kerr, " he was the boy to gather this very army together. My niggers on the Lavaca told me how he reached there half dead, and John Moore on the Colorado says he was nigh plum' dead when he got there, and Mr. Austin tells how they had to lift him off his horse when he rode into San Felipe. But he kept on, rousing the country clear to Nacogdoches, and then on down to the Gulf, to warn Old Man Buckalew about being on the list " "What's that you sav?" roared Old Man Buckalew 2 o6 THE LONE STAR himself. "Look here, young Rip Let me come to the boy! why didn't you tell me " "But more'n that," another took up the strain, and I thrilled, for it was the ringing voice of Ben Milam, "more'n that, he rode right into Goliad to do it, Buck. Poor Ratsy told me, but I wanted to see if young Rip would tell, which he didn't. And do you know, Buck, they cut him all up, and he was only just out of bed when we found him spanking Ratsy with Ratsy 's own sword, and then he went with us to take " But I turned away, hurt and angry. It would have been so glorious, had they meant it ! But how could they, when Nan was at that moment in San Antonio through my fault, and awaiting I dared not think what peril because of me? CHAPTER XXII WANTED: A BOWIE, A MILAM "fT^HESE here Mex'kins don't have to stay no longer A in Texas," and every citizen soldier who had to sleep nights on the wet earth fumed because we were not taking the town straight off. Buckalew and Milam had no need to plead Nan's danger. Sympathy for the old man was quick. This having one's women folk in cap- tivity was not an unusual affliction. Indian raids had long since accustomed men to that anguish, and to band together for rescue was a matter of course. . But the citizen soldiers were ready enough without that. How- ever, the commander-in-chief was not. And there lay our trouble. Poor Mr. Austin, broken in health after months in a dungeon, and nigh heart-broken, in solici- tude for his people, could not endure the thought of hurling one thousand of his best against odds behind stone walls. "Heavens, man," he said to Buckalew, "we can't tear down masonry with our bare hands! We must either wait for siege guns, or starve them out." Buckalew was in a dangerous mood when he joined us outside Mr. Austin's tent. The old Redlander tur- bulence was seething. "We got to get someone else in there," he swore. "Just a man ain't enough; we need a devil. Now where 'n hell is Sam Houston? Why ain't he here? " " He's with the convention at San Felipe," said Milam, "organising a state government and such. Austin wanted him to take command here, but he wouldn't. 207 aoS THE LONE STAR Didn't want to stir up any jealousies in the high grass." "Then there's Jim Bowie. Or you, Ben, or you." "Buck, it won't do, I tell you. Then there's another thing. Austin ain't here for long. He wouldn't even let the convention make him governor, for he's going to the States, and he'll help us there more'n any man left in Texas." "Then," said Buckalew, "God bless him, but mean- whiles there don't 'pear to be anything powerful brisk about getting into that town over there, and if no one else wants to go or not, I'm telling you " "Jes' words, Buck." Buckalew whirled at the taunt, but his fist opened to a handclasp. "All teetotal Creation," he exclaimed, "Deaf Smith! " The old scout, for a fact! From out of the wide world somewhere he had drawn near us, and there he stood, as ever a lone and silent man, a quiet smile on his leathery face, two fingers playing a tattoo on the back of his ear. I had not seen him in three years, but he was the same Deaf Smith under his coonskin cap with the fur turned in, the same good old weather-beaten friend, except that now the lynx-like eyes were growing dim. I too had him by the hand, and so had Milam, and a hand less of iron we three must have crushed into a jelly. Gruff old barnacled heart, his was yet the heart that had beat for a lonely boy who had thought himself a reproach for evermore in the eyes of men. The tears welled in my eyes now because of that boy's gratitude. He looked at me hard from under porcupine brows. "That chin of your'n, sonny?" he queried. "Trouble you any more?" I did not understand at first, but asked no question. Deaf Smith's few words were not to be questioned. WANTED: A BOWIE, A MILAM 209 "Umph," and he ended the matter gruff and short. "A sledge-hammer wouldn't soften it none now. The rockiest heft of jaw ever I see! " He loosed his hand, and ferreted in his hunting jacket, until he brought forth a crumpled ball of paper. This he handed to Buckalew. It was a letter from Nan. "You mean to say," demanded Milam, while Buckalew picked at the letter with trembling fingers, trying to smooth it out, "you mean to say you've been in the town?" Deaf Smith never meant to say anything. He only nodded. Of course, how else could he get the letter? "Then you saw Nan?" cried Nan's father, "You saw Nan?" "No. Gritton. The girl is safe." But why waste more words? Deaf Smith pointed to the letter. "Well? "said Milam. "Well?" I repeated. I know that I was the most anxious there. Buckalew wiped off his shell-rimmed spectacles, and read the letter a second time. "Well," he said at last, "I reckon we needn't storm their old town any. Starving's good enough, and a sight safer for Nan. She won't starve, my girl won't. She and Mrs. Long are with the Veramendi's Bowie's father-in-law, you know and they've got a smoke- house full of cawn." "But about General Cos," objected Milam, "and the danger of his finding out who Nan is?" "That's all right, too, because they won't let her out of the house, though Nan seems to be about as mad as. a hornet about it. She wants to get out and see what our cannon balls smash in." The besiegers might fret after this, and they did, espe- cially the volunteers from the States, who had come fqr 2io THE LONE STAR action and wanted action. But as for Nan's father and myself, we drew on our patience, hoping now that an assault would not be necessary. If we could starve out the Mexicans instead! The hope grew more reason- able, too. Small detachments of our people were con- stantly ranging round the town to keep out beeves, and after a time General Cos tried to send away his horses as he no longer had fodder for them. Again, once during the night, a force of Mexicans even ventured outside to cut grass, but Bowie with half as many men killed about fifty of them, captured their loaded burros, and chased the rest back into the town. He himself did not lose a man. The Mexicans were surely in a hard way. How we hoped, day by day, that they had less to eat than the day before! It was an unpleasant thing to hope, and this business known as war sickened me with myself. Then, as I pictured the garrison as very hungry, and still more hungry, I became enraged at them because they still held out, and thus kept us from tendering them a feast. But while matters were shaping to our notion inside the town, they were doing nothing of the kind outside. Each week made it more unlikely that we would ever take the place; if, indeed, there would be enough of us left for the job. There was not the patience in our impetuous and undisciplined band to wait on starvation. Christmas was drawing near, too, and thoughts of families in lonely cabins grew insistent. The settlers came and went as they listed, but mostly they went. The fiery youngsters from the States grumbled. There were not tents enough, and they did not relish the cheer- less and monotonous camp life on a bleak, norther- swept prairie. They had come in summer clothing, and now wore nothing heavier. As shoes gave out, their feet touched the ground. Often we did not have WANTED: A BOWIE, A MILAM 211 rations, and many were sick, and all were homesick. A fight, and nothing but a fight, would or could satisfy. Our little army of one thousand dribbled away to a mutinous seven hundred ; and meantime Mexicans within the town were barricading every street, making every house a fortress, every ditch a trench, while rumours spread that Santa Ana himself was organising a horde of invasion of ten thousand. The hour for assault was past, to all reasonable minds. And to the unreason- able, the hour to raise the siege had come. And the chance for Nan's rescue? Each new development sharpened the agony a hundred-fold, until poor old Buckalew was nearly out of his mind. Thus hope rolled fearfully down hill, and at last was shattered on desperation at the bottom. There was, to begin, the news that my brother Phil had to tell. "You know Doc Grant, that Coahuila Scotchman?" he began one evening, as we met for our night's rest and supper at the wickiup we had made in a pecan grove on the river's bank. Yes, I knew Doc Grant, and I knew that Doc Grant Was talking mutiny to volunteers who were ready for anything that promised quick action. Doc Grant wanted to lead them against Matamoras at the mouth of the Rio Grande. He would carry the war into the enemy's country, and all Mexico would rise with us to support the Constitution against Santa Ana. Grant plied a seductive tongue. He would pay our men with the customs at Matamoras, and at the same time cripple Mexico. I knew, though, that this Scotchman wanted back the haciendas and mines in Coahuila that Santa Ana had taken from him, and that he had come to get the Texans to help him, without, on the other hand, caring a fig for Texas. And yet I honestly thought that the Matamoras scheme was the part of wisdom; aia THE LONE STAR that is, after we had taken San Antonio, and when mere should no longer be a Mexican army in Texas. "Well, what about Doc Grant now?" I asked. "He's got the Grays, that's all. We've just about decided to go with him." "What, and leave the Mexicans here behind you?" "Not I, Harry," he protested. The boy suspected my own concern in this matter. "No, I'll stay all right, but the rest well, they'll either go to Matamoras or back home, unless unless there's a chance to end things mighty quick." The end would fall quickly enough, once the Grays turned their faces to Matamoras. They would not go alone, either, and there would not be enough of us left to starve out a block house. The climax of despair came on us this same night. Deaf Smith, who had been away on a scout for several days, walked into the light of our little camp fire. I dropped the skillet in my hand, and stood up, for I knew him well enough to detect the momentous in his taciturn bearing. "Where's Buck?" he asked. I nodded toward the wickiup, where the old man sat on his blanket, gnawing either the end of his moustache, or the stem of his remnant of a "churchwarden." "Come," said Deaf Smith, and leaving our fire and supper, Buckalew and Phil and I followed where he led. He kept to the low bank of the tortuous little river, nor did he stop until we had passed our lines almost under the walls of the Alamo. But at last, in the black night of a cottonwood grove, where a step farther would have brought us headlong into an irrigation ditch, he halted us, and gave a sound so like an owl that I was at first deceived. Almost at once, by leaping across the ditch, a fourth man was among us. "Now then," whispered Deaf Smith. WANTED: A BOWIE, A MILAM 213 The stranger, however, was in no hurry. He struck a match matches were a new and rare invention and Deaf Smith smothered it in his hand, but not before the stranger had peered into our faces, and I had recog- nised the drooping moustache, the drooping sandy lashes, and the bulby eyes of my Englishman built on the drooping plan. "Why, it's Mr. Gritton!" exclaimed Buckalew, "About Nan, now? Quick, about Nan?" We heard a box snap open, and I could picture Gritton, with elbow elaborately curved, shaking the snuff clear of his vest. "To be sure," he said in his bored way, "but who have we heah; y' know, this ah child?" He meant Phil, and the cold, lazy drawl was as a spark to that powder-can of a brother of mine. The young- ster's breath came fast, but as he brushed past me in the dark toward the insufferable Briton, I caught his wrist. "He's with me," said Old Man Buckalew, "and that's enough. Now about Nan? Quick!" "Ah yes, to be sure. When are you-ah coming for her?" It was a cruel question. During each waking moment of the past intolerable weeks Nan's father had asked himself no other. "Go on," ordered Deaf Smith. "Because," said Gritton, "she walks on the roof, and to-day, as she was leaning over the parapet, to see if one of your shells was not going to blow up the Alamo, some oe passed in the street below, a-ah low fellow named named ah Yandell." " God Almighty, man, and did he look up? " "To be sure." "And recognised her?" 2i 4 THE LONE STAR "Can't say, y' know, but she recognised him." "But why in the world," I demanded, "didn't you bring her with you?" Gritton's legs were probably spread wide, and he was probably fondling his moustache, and I could feel his insolent, detached gaze on me. But no more in the dark than in the light could he get it into his dense skull that I existed. Nan had said "Another time." I would make it "Now," once for all. I loosed Phil's wrist, but Phil was quicker. Instantly he had the Briton by the collar, and was shaking him with the will and the spirit of '76. "Your manners," he hissed between his teeth, "your manners, you you Englishman!" There was a blow, smacking, compact, on the cheek on Phil's cheek. But there was another, and Phil stood over him. "Get up. Get up, and answer my brother." "Ah," rose Gritton's voice, "our young friend's brother, eh?" "No young friend about it," Phil retorted. "Mr. Ripley, sir." "Mr. ah Ripley." "Sir," Phil persisted. "Sir," repeated the Englishman. "Now get up, and answer." "For once," said Deaf Smith, chuckling for the first time ever recorded, "they wasn't jes' words." Gritton rose deliberately, and carefully slapped the dust and leaves from his breeches. "Mr. Ripley, sir," he began, addressing me exclusively he was by all odds a unique specimen; yes, even for an Englishman "What would you say now, if, in escorting Miss Buckalew and Mrs. Long here, I had met this-ah Yandell ? ' ' WANTED: A BOWIE, A MILAM 215 "No, no," and Nan's father shivered, "you did best not to risk it. Morn'n likely he'd be watching the house." "But you, sir," I persisted, "how is it that they did not stop you?" "Or me either?" grumbled Deaf Smith. Well, if Deaf Smith knew, it was all right. They had bribed a few sentinels, no doubt. "Re-ahly now, Mr. Buckalew," said Gritton, "you must come for her, y' know. As to an attack, I can-ah advise ' ' But Deaf Smith would let him advise nothing. That was the scout's own business, when he reported to our general on what he had learned in the town. "An attack?" moaned Buckalew. "And the few of us left about to traipse off to Matamoras with this fellow Grant!" "I beg pardon?" said Gritton. "About to go to Matamoras, I said. Carry the war into the enemy's country, and all that contraptioning." "And it might be a good thing," I interposed, "but after the siege here." Gritton stirred abruptly, and I imagined that he jerked his moustache. "A-h?" he said, in his faintly sceptical way. "You also have the Matamoras fever, Mr. Ripley, sir?' "What difference can that make to you?" " De-uh me, none, to be sure." But I still felt that he was looking at me contempla- tively, or trying to. "Anything further, gentlemen?" he asked. Deaf Smith indicated that there was nothing. "In which case " He leaped the ditch, and we had to admit, for all his cool indifference to the girl's peril, that it was also cool indifference to his own. 2i6 THE LONE STAR " au revoir" he completed his farewell, as he van- ished through the trees. "We shall meet in the town." "God!" moaned Buckalew despairingly. "Don't, Buck, don't," said Deaf Smith. Now Deaf Smith was not given to empty consolation. He took Nan's father by the elbow, and turned toward camp, and then direct to the tent of our general. Mr. Austin had left on his mission to the States, and the army had chosen in his stead a worthy planter named Edward Burleson. Mr. Burleson, was without military experience, and like Mr. Austin, he could not nerve himself to the responsibility of ordering the supreme attack. But now Deaf Smith convinced him that the strength of the place was not as great as he had feared, and that, moreover, the half-starved garrison was nearer to mutiny than ourselves. Two American residents of the town who had escaped to our lines added their testimony, and in the end we left the tent with orders to report at four o'clock in the morning. At last, at last, we were to storm the beleaguered city. The camp slept exultantly the rest of that night, or slept not at all. The youngsters were happy, the frontiersmen grimly determined. Buckalew was torn by dread of the scene his child must face on the morrow. And I could think of nothing except that I was going to see Nan again. That was enough to keep me from sleeping, all right; that, and trying to hope that she might care to see me too. Yet there was Gritton. He had had a clear field during the past weeks, and . . . But would four o'clock never, never come! It was dark as night at that hour of that chilling December morning, when the Army of the People, seven hundred shivering men whose naked fingers stiffened on their flintlocks, gathered for the work of that day. Captains in shirts of linsey-woolsey hastily WANTED: A BOWIE, A MILAM 217 mustered their companies, colonels in deerskin moc- casins formed their skeleton regiments, and we awaited only the general. But there was a conference of some sort going on in the general's tent. Men stamped their feet and swung their arms for warmth and lack of patience. The delay did not bode well. We peered fret- fully towards the rolling shadowy horizon line in the east, knowing that the sun would be prompt, though our general were not. Then the flap of the tent was thrown open, and in the yellow area of candle-light officers appeared. "Now!" we cried. "Now!" , One of that council of war was Deaf Smith. I heard his teeth click unpleasantly as he went up to Buckalew. "Countermanded!" he said wearily. "What?" "You don't mean no, hell no!" Thus the word spread, gathering venom, rolling up virulence and violence. The citizen soldiery huddled there in the dark night, breathless to risk their lives like veterans, lashed themselves with that word. They began to move restlessly , murmuring louder their curses. In only a little they were almost a lawless mob, gathered for a lynching. Countermanded, eh? One of our spies had not come back, eh? Might be captured, eh? And General Burleson feared the Mexicans knew our plans, that was it, eh? And Mexicans were expecting us? Balls of fire, why disappoint them, then? Weren't we men, we Texians, to keep our dates like men? Yes, by God, we would, or ... There was peril for our general in that alternative. "Where's Jim Bowie?" cried one. "He'll lead us." "Jim Bowie!" cried everybody. But Bowie was not there. He was out foraging. "Then Ben Milam! Old Ben Milam!" 2 i8 THE LONE STAR But Milam was away too. He commanded the scouts, and impelled by magnificent fury, he could never keep quietly in camp so long as the Mexicans were in Texas. "Then boys," shouted Dr. Grant, circulating actively, seductively, "there's nothing for it but Matamoras. Who's for Matamoras?" "All of us, Doc! All of us!" yelled back the Army of the People. "God, God, God!" sobbed Old Man Buckalew. Men gathered round him in the break of day, and these men saw red. Buckalew caught the dangerous note in their sympathy, and he roused himself to prevent. "No, not on Burleson," he cried. " But he's ordered a general parade. General parades, your grandmother! If he can't general up anything better " "And he's ordered the march to Goliad this evening "To go into winter quarters." "No, no, we'll go to Matamoras." Their angry cries rose to hoots, and many surged about the tent of the generalissimo of general parades, daring him to show himself. "Not there, not there!" cried Buckalew. "But to the town! Who will lead us to the town?" And he called aloud on Ben Milam, on his friend Ben Milam, like one insane, but his frenzy of appeal, I think, was more to Heaven above. And then, even as he called, we saw a cloud of dust made by a troop, and the cloud grew; and the scouts, and Milam leading, galloped among us. The shout of "Ben Milam!" rose on all sides. Buck- alew caught his friend's bridle, turned his horse's head toward the town, would not let him dismount. He murmured incoherently of the assault postponed, of Nan's danger. WANTED: A BOWIE, A MILAM 219 Milam leaned over and touched the old man on the shoulder. The clamouring of the Army was in his ears. He straightened in his saddle, and his eyes under the heavy brows hardened to cold steel as he looked over the jostling mob. He raised his hand, and then we heard his voice, loud, ringing, inspiriting. "Who will go to San Antone with old Ben Milam?" In that ringing tone, what question more absurd? Seven hundred men yelled their reply. When Texans yell, you have there the note of huge endeavour. Yes, the question was absurd. CHAPTER XXIII THREE HUNDRED MEN BUT though the verve of a youngster fired his veins, Milam was yet too old a campaigner to go charg- ing a fortified town without any plans whatever. Again in the dead of night, again near four o'clock the next morning, and under cover of a dry norther's rowdy blasts, three hundred of us Milam would take but three hundred gathered at the old mill for that silent, jubilant, and death-like march on the sleeping Old World town of San Antonio. Half-way there through the high wet mesquite grass, our force split into two divisions and entered the. town by two parallel streets. These streets led to the Plaza with its church and garrisoned presidio; in a word, to the citadel of the place. The first of the two streets was Soledad Street, and impulsive Colonel Frank Johnson, our adjutant-general, commanded those who entered here. The rest of us, including the Grays, Buckalew and myself, followed Ben Milam down to the street just beyond. Tip-toeing like thieves along a dark corri- dor, we groped our way into the town. We hugged the walls where there were walls, and took care not to tumble into a ditch that threaded the street. The street was named Acequia Street because of this ditch, though ditches were nearly as plentiful as streets in San Antonio. "And the Veramendi house?" Buckalew asked in a whisper of our guide. The guide was Sam Maverick, one of the residents who had escaped to our lines. "On farther," said Maverick, "then to the left." THREE HUNDRED MEN 221 "Shut up!" ordered Milam. "But Nan is at Veramendi's, Ben Lordy, what's that?" A cannon roared on the opposite edge of the town, toward the Alamo. For the moment we did not remember that those left behind were to feign an assault on the Alamo. More cannon boomed, and there were yells. The sham attack sounded very earnest and business-like. The town before us was awakening, at first stricken, then mumbling, then rising to panic. Tousled heads and frightened eyes appeared behind the bars of windows. Bolts and chains rattled, a door opened, and a swarthy citizen in undress was seen skurrying. His wife screamed behind him. She crossed herself frantically as she ran, and fell on her knees to pray. The citizen left her there. Ahead of us, in the centre of town, the confusion grew. Bells in the old church dome began jangling. Drums and bugles sounded in the barracks at the Plaza. We heard the flurry of soldiers as officers hurried them to the Alamo. But all the while we blotted ourselves against the fronts of houses, treading softly, swiftly, undisturbed, darting like a spawn of sinister fish through the torpid stream of gray mist between the walls. "Get on!" panted Milam. "On, as far as we can before - " We broke into a run, and ran on the balls of our feet. The padded pattering beat in cadence with our stifled breathing. Yet thus far our part of the world was as an invaded tomb, while off there in the distance all was a yelping snarl, as interpreted by man's invention of gunpowder. Buckalew sprang ahead, abreast with our guide. "When to the left?" he gasped. "Here, this corner." 222 THE LONE STAR Round the corner we swung, the Grays pushing from behind, coming down on the heels of the men in front. In this cross street, a block ahead, Johnson's men were just appearing. A fleeing sentinel turned on them and fired his escopeta. I saw Deaf Smith, who was Johnson's guide, fire his pistol at the same time, then lurch sideways into Johnson's arms. But he had killed the sentinel. Our part of the world was no longer a silent tomb, and yet it was a tomb more truly. "Now for cover!" shouted Milam. "Quick, where?" "Just to the corner," yelled Maverick. "Here we are, the Garza house." Crowbars laid open the doors, and in we rushed, driving the terrified Garzas back to their rooms. "But this ain't Veramendi's," and Buckalew turned, and tried to get out again. But the current of in- pouring men was a mill-race. Cannon on the church roof a block away were sweeping the street, and the raging Buckalew was borne inside by the stream. "To the roof!" bellowed Milam. The Garza roof was flat, around which the walls rose two feet higher. This parapet was a mighty good thing for us as we scrambled up into a horizontal sleet of grape and musket balls. The Mexicans were firing from the church and presidio ramparts across an almost vacant square that lay between, and also from trenches and barricades in the streets below. Even the batteries on the Alamo, a half-mile away, contributed ugly black eight-pounders to our little inferno. We were like men wrecked on a rock in a molten sea of lead. Yet our strategists had planned for the desperate best. As the old Indian fighters among us came tumbling up, and ducked below the level of the parapet, they needed only a glance before their flint-locks were clearing the nearest batteries. THREE HUNDRED MEN 223 "Veramendi's?" It was Buckalew's first word as he gained the roof, leaped on the parapet, and gazed through the powder smoke blown by the norther over the low stone houses and garden patches of the town. In the sputtering furnace around him, somewhere, was Nan. "Vera " I jerked him down. I was enraged that anyone should expose himself, and I almost cuffed him in my anger. "Here, I'll show you Veramendi's," said Maverick. Our own house of refuge, it should be understood, faced a cross street, and was flanked by Soledad Street, down which Johnson's men had come. "That's Veramendi's," said Maverick, "that large house across Soledad Street with the big doors and the garden in the back. Johnson went in there. Don't you see his fellows on the roof?" We looked where he pointed, and recognised the Mississippi volunteers blazing lustily away at some rifle pits in the Plaza. "Then that's "I began. "Yes, that's Veramendi's." Milam's bony fingers closed over my wrist. "Now where are you going?" he demanded. I reddened like a schoolboy caught sending notes to a girl. "Tears to me it's enough holding the old man," said Milam. "Now you get to work." Someone laughed in high glee at my elbow. "Pretty time for sweethearting," chortled that baby brother of mine. "Pretty time " The lad was excited, happy, hysterical. I envied him the rapture that glistened in his eyes and trembled on his lip. "Idiot!" I yelled, grabbing his leg. "Get down!" 224 THE LONE STAR "But I hit one!" he protested, as though that were reason for making a target of himself. "Hit one, I tell you! Oh Harry, if this isn't " "Here, you boys," shouted Milam over the din, "stop your whispering,. and get to work." "Yes, sir," said Phil. He could not get it into his head that this was work. He levelled his rifle over the parapet, and aimed at first one thing and another, even pausing with a bead on the distant Alamo. The greedy youngster wanted to shoot everything at once. But when he did pull the trigger, there was no report. He looked at me abashed. He had forgotten to reload. As for myself, I wondered greatly to discover that even the intensest excitement could not keep a man's thoughts long from himself. The inferno did not once abate all that day, except for partial lapses when new gunners had to be driven to the Mexican batteries, yet slowly I got to thinking, questioning, as though it were the eve of battle, and not the battle itself, and this odd vagary of self-consciousness astonished me. Then dread began to creep into the soft core of my bones, and I feared and hated the dread, as one fears and hates an old malady that he hoped he had done with forever. There was no mistaking this malady. It was Anticipation Cowardice, if you like. The next minute, the next second, and my brains might be spattered over the roof. I could not deny the imminent probability. One simply had to admit the imminent probability, that was all. And then what? Face it, defy it? Or run and hide? Run and hide, and by that act lay bare the foul secret canker of Fear in your soul? Very strangely, the thought of running did not once occur to me. It never did. And yet the hideous- ness of self-scrutiny at such a time! My spine was like a tallow dip in a burning house, and then I shivered, THREE HUNDRED MEN 225 as though a cake of ice were laid against the spine. But crouching behind the thick parapet to reload, I felt curiously snug and comfortable, as one does at night when wind and rain beat on the shutters. Yet it was not fair for any man of our little band to waste an instant. One had to aim coolly, too, and never waste a single shot. But it was very hard to swallow down the lump in one's throat by swallowing after it that lump of philosophy about a man's having to die in any case. "The wretch that trembles in the field of fame, Meets death, and worse than death, eternal shame." How reasonable a morsel in exalted moments of safe reflection! But how unpalatable in the test! I looked about me to note how the others behaved, and then I saw and marvelled that they were not falling like flies on that smoke-covered roof. No, we had not lost a man. The sharpshooters in the cupola of the church had contrived to reward Dr. Grant, with a nasty hole through the shoulder. Phil's captain was also wounded; of which, however, the Grays were both proud and envious But as I say, not a man was killed, despite the horizontal pelting of lead, and I was vaguely dis- turbed to find the legendary and conventional upset in this manner. Was I then afraid for nothing? I rammed home a tight ball, sprang on the parapet, and aimed, aimed as coolly as the cucumber-blooded Bowie himself. Yes, I had been afraid for nothing. The bullets whistled, but it was just noise, and not death, that is, not invari- ably. The all important thing, however, was this: I had convinced myself that I could stand under fire, and But just then smoke puffed up from the top of the church, and a ball crashed through the Veramendi roof, and Johnson's men there were forced below. At that 226 THE LONE STAR Fear took me worse than ever, a worse fear, and yet at least a generous one. For Nan was under that roof, and that cursed church battery must be stopped. The new kind of trembling kept me off the parapet from that time on. I took no more risks, but reloaded fever- ishly and quickly, though the stiff wind blew the powder back into my eyes. I aimed from cover too, that I might be saved to make yet one more shot count for a gunner on that church roof. Milam had the greatest difficulty all day long in restrain- ing Old Man Buckalew, who was near insane for some word of Nan. But it was impossible to go to the Ver- amendi house, since a howitzer in the rifle pits constantly raked the street ; and as for yelling a question and mak- ing ourselves heard, the boisterous wind and the inces- sant battle under the leaden sky drowned our voices each time we tried. Night came, and yet the firing never stopped. "Don't matter," said Buckalew, "I'm going any- how," and the look on his face showed that he would. "All right, then," said Milam. "Come on." "But Ben, you needn't " "Yes, I do need," said Milam, buttoning his coat to the chin as though he were to make a dash through a blizzard. "I've got to figger out what next with Johnson over there." I followed them to the door. Two of the Grays lifted off the bar. Then one held the door, ready to pull it open. Milam fastened the last button, and turning to wave his hand to us, he saw me. "Hey, young Rip," he exclaimed, "sure you're not going too?" His mouth twisted boyishly, teasingly, at the corners, and there was the light that thrilled in his eyes. I caught my breath. THREE HUNDRED MEN 227 "Yes," I said. Until then I really did not know that I meant to go. The mechanical utterance of the syllable, all the strength of will lay in just that. But the word was spoken, and the mere body was then committed to what might befall, To unsay the little word would take yet greater strength. "Oh-oh," said Milam, laughing outright, "the three of us then. Open the door, boys. Now buckle to it Now!" He passed through, and vanished. Buckalew crowded him. My jaws locked, and I crowded Buckalew. The door slammed behind me, and I was outside. The black stormy night was streaked everywhere with flashes. The bombarding had quickened as the door opened, and was sharp and vicious, like lightning and thunderclaps all in chaos. One shock that blinded and deafened yet gave me an instant's glimpse of Milam and Buckalew darting ahead. The next moment we three thumped together against the Veramendi doors. They were heavy, of cedar, and they opened sluggishly before our pounding, but they opened on the bright, cheery glare of pine torches within. It was like a cosy warm house when one comes panting in out of the cold. I tried to find Nan's face among the many tanned and rugged ones as I rushed inside. But I did not see her, and this thought, that she was not there, that she was not there, was beating against my brain when Buckalew gave a sharp cry almost with the closing of the doors after us, and turning, I saw Milam's head double over limp on his breast, and his body sink like a rag to the floor. Men's faces were never more stricken than those rough- weathered ones in the Veramendi house. Their gaunt old friend crumpled there in his rags was dead. That was the first thing. But next, they could not believe 228 THE LONE STAR it. No one said much. What was there they could say? Many cursed low in a deadly way, but aimlessly, others moaned: " How how will we do without him? " Old Man Buckalew, kneeling beside our dead chief, looked up angrily. "How?" he cried. "How? Wy, this town is as good as taken, right now! As good as taken, ain't it, Ben? And Texas too, Ben! And Texas, too!" CHAPTER XXIV CREDITORS AS THEY took Buckalew's meaning, that meaning -f~V was reflected in the hard countenance of each man there, and the look of them was somewhat that of very stern creditors. They had paid in advance. Their poor gallant leader stretched dead at their feet was the token. And now they would exact payment. The debtors outnumbered us five to one, and they had cannon and might stay behind stone walls. As Indians besmear their cheeks to terrify, our debtors had that day unfurled over the church the blood-red flag, the emblem of "No quarter." The Mexicans had decided that not one of us should live. Yet I could imagine no greater terror than to face this little throng of be- leaguered Texans with that expression hardening in their eyes. What signified a gaudy crimson rag? This other thing was doom itself. I shuddered for the Mexicans as these men buried old Ben Milam where he fell. We had passed through fire thus disastrously, Nan's father and I, but we had not found Nan. Deaf Smith, his shoulder bandaged and weak from the wound, came to us and handed Buckalew a letter in Nan's hand- writing. She had left it with one of Gritton's servants whom Johnson's men had found still in the house. Mr. Gritton, she wrote, had told her of his interview with her father, and she had guessed that her father would fight his way to the Veramendi house as soon as possible 229 230 THE LONE STAR after the attack began. She herself wished to stay at Veramendi's, to see the fighting, if nothing more, but Mr. Gritton had made it clear to Mrs. Long that they must hide elsewhere, and only the night before they had done so. "Where," demanded Buckalew, thrusting the letter under Deaf Smith's nose, "is this priest's house she says she's gone to?" "Right across the street from the Plaza barracks." "Right under their cannon too," cried Buckalew. "Right in their power! But how far, how far is it from here?" " 'Bout a thousand yards." A thousand yards of stone wall to fight through, and each yard meant also that much nearer to the cannon of the barracks. The little fraction of space broadened as to infinity. "Never mind," said Deaf Smith, "we'll make 'em a few yards less in the morning." When morning dawned, though, we found the Mex- icans as thick and venomous as nests of snakes on all the roofs between us and the Plaza. We could not clear them off, either, as they had drilled loopholes through the parapets. There was nothing for it but to charge on the first house, take that, take breath for the next one, and so work our way to the citadel, to the barracks in the Plaza. The first house was a lone dwelling in the open square between the Garza house and the Plaza. A handful of volunteers, led by a chubby man named Henry Karnes with a lady-like voice and a crowbar, rushed through the murderous fire of all out-doors, crossed the open space intervening, broke down the door of the lone dwelling, and there fought hand to hand to get inside. Excruciatingly slow they seemed about it, like CREDITORS 231 a rabbit disappearing into a serpent's jaws, but they were equally sure, too. Then, almost at once, they appeared on the roof, the defenders giving way before them, backing till they tumbled over the parapets. The open square around the house was honeycombed with rifle pits, and between these and our boys on the roof there now followed a sharpshooting duel, which ended when the pits were silenced and we ourselves were entrenched in them. After this, you will say, we took the Plaza itself, that obviously coming next. But let me explain. The Plaza was really two plazas, each a square, with a square in between occupied by the old stone church, and all covering a space three blocks long by one wide. Now the section of plaza opposed to the open square we had just won was an open square likewise, then known as the Plaza de las Yslas. To proceed in this direction, then, we would only expose ourselves in the open to the guns of the church. Consequently we had to keep behind walls. In other words, we must first storm and occupy those houses along the street that opposed the church, or middle square, and then do the same thing with those that opposed the third square. And this third square, by the way, was the Plaza de Armas, the site of the presidio, the ramparts, the barracks; or, as I have said, the citadel. Accordingly, after the affair of the rifle pits, we changed our course from direct to sideways. We took the house next to the Garza house, which was easy, and so on down to Acequia Street, where we charged across the ditch and on one block farther, till we reached the street beyond, Flores Street, which ran parallel to Acequia, and likewise opened on the Plaza. It was here that we changed our course again, working behind walls, from one wall to the next, and thus on direct toward 2 3 2 THE LONE STAR the church. The houses in this block were built together and were called the Zambrano Row, and Zambrano Row that day gave its name to a desperate and unique battle. When we had taken the first of these houses and cleared it of the swarthy, cornered, wildcat Mexicans, we dug our way with crowbars through two feet of stone into the next house, and there fought a second hand-to-hand battle; and then a third battle, and a fourth, and a fifth; with wolfish eyes ever giving way before us in the half light, and escopetas spitting fair in our faces, and knives and bayonets slashing and stabbing, and screeches deafening us, and smoke blinding and choking. That was one day's work, but that night we ate our supper in the last house down Flores Street, where the Na- varros lived. The Navarro house was on the corner and faced the middle square of the Plaza. Diagonally across the street lay the Plaza de Armas, and there rose the corner of the barracks. Standing on the roof of Navarro's, we could throw a stone over the walls of the barracks into the barracks compound ; and one block more sideways, at the corresponding corner, opposite the farther corner of the barracks, there was the priest's house where Nan and Mrs. Long had taken refuge. Once in there, we should have the citadel itself to grapple with. That priest's house was the acme of the assault. During the past four days we had fought, and during the nights we had made sandbag breastworks and dug trenches with our meagre tools to hold our communi- cations, and each morning we had found new batteries and new rifle pits that must be soothed to quiet. This night, though, we hoped for a good nap behind the Navarro walls not yet crumbled by cannon, but even now there was work overtime ahead of us. I was on the roof in a drizzling chilly rain, stuffing down corn pone to the last crumb. I looked over the CREDITORS 233 houses facing the barracks, and tried to locate the farthest one, which sheltered Nan. Here another of our fellows joined me, and turning to see who he was, I made out the cape coat and shapeless cap of Old Man Buckalew. He was silent and restrained, as he had been toward me ever since Nan's chance of harm from Santa Ana through my blundering. I believe the warm-hearted old warrior feared he might be gruff in earnest, as he certainly had reason to be. Neither of us spoke, but by a common impulse we stood our vigil in the rain, guarding from afar that priest's house that sheltered Nan. To-morrow we would make a few more yards, and then. . . . There were muffled sounds in the compound behind the barracks walls. We stood on the parapet and listened. Sputtering volleys from the Mexican trenches interrupted. But when these died out, we distinctly heard the noise of wheels, as of a carriage being drawn out of a shed, and then of horses led from a corral. The Mexicans over in the barracks yard were hitching up for some midnight deviltry. Soon a band of armed men filed stealthily out into the street. "They're bound for the priest's house," I whispered. "It it's something to do with Nan." "Oh hardly, " I said. "They're only getting ready for us for to-morrow." "But that's as bad. They'll find her, won't they? If they if they don't know it already. And that car- riage. Listen, there she goes." "And toward the priest's house, too!" A moment later we were telling it all below to Colonel Frank Johnson, Milam's successor as our leader. John- son was sympathetic, not about the carriage, but about the soldiers occupying the priest's house. "Good," he ejaculated. "We'll do it to-night now right-off!" 234 THE LONE STAR He rattled off his orders in the same impulsive way. In five minutes a hundred of us, including the Grays and some Brazoria planters, followed him out into the rain. We kept back of the street, and threaded our way through gardens and backyards, aiming for the rear of the priest's house. We got as far as the garden wall of this house, when a cry in Spanish rang out behind the wall and an escopeta blazed wildly. The Texans yelled, and started up and over the wall like a pack of wolves. The clangorous wee hell of sharp in-fighting began at once on the other side. But at the first alarm, as I sprang at the wall, Buckalew jerked me back. Deaf Smith was with him. "Here, this way," he said. My brother Phil, clinging to the top of the wall, saw that I was called off, and he too dropped back. He suspected that there was excitement of a more exclusive nature forward, and he did not propose to be deprived. It was so like the old days when he construed any whisper of our old mammy to me as involving high-shelf jars in the pantry that I all but laughed, even at that moment. But the moment was a second only, for we four half- circled the garden and house on the run, and came out on the street in front. And there, at the door, was the carriage from the barracks, and a considerable man was languidly knocking down other men with his fists. One of these men, being caught on the tip of the chin, reeled backward against me, but I flung him on into the gutter, as when one unknowingly touches a toad. The fellow was Lush Yandell. " Ton honour, gentlemen," spoke the considerable man who was knocking the others down, "you're in time." He was dusting the palms of his hands, one against the other, and was greeting Buckalew as though they CREDITORS 235 had met at the church door on their way in to service. Of course, the man was Gritton. Yandell picked himself up, saw Gritton reinforced, and ran bellowing his rage toward the barracks, his ruffians following. They left the carriage behind. "Nan? Where's Nan?" Buckalew darted into the house to see for himself, the rest of us with him. Through the back way our men were rushing in from the garden. An inner door opened, and two women, hurriedly dressed, ran among us. "Daddy!" cried the first, and two white arms circled Buckalew 's neck. But one of those gleaming white arms straightened out across his shoulder to me, and if you wish, you may believe that I seized that proffered hand, even though it were behind her father's back. "But I thought," she exclaimed, "I thought, Harry, that you were still in Goliad ? " Gritton, evidently, had not remembered seeing me between our lines long enough to mention it to her. "Now, now, you little catamou't," scolded Buckalew, getting crabbed, rapturously crabbed, as he gave Nan one more hug, and crushed Mrs. Long's hand, and hugged Nan again, and clapped Deaf Smith on the back, then back to Nan, and pounded me on the chest, or anywhere, then to Mrs. Long again, and so on with this endless chain until he was his old crabbed self again. "Now then, missy, out of this you get. Yes, yes, and there's the hack at the door." "But I don't want to," Nan protested. "It isn't every day that I can sit at my window and see a battle, and to-morrow Please, Daddy, only till to-morrow." Nor was it any use to urge danger. "But there's Mrs. Long," at last said Deaf Smith, and Nan at once complied. She herself would see that 236 THE LONE STAR Mrs. Long got safely back to camp. She led the way to the carriage, put the old lady in, and followed. Phil leaped to the box, and took the reins. That boy's lightning-like decision outran the reproof of veterans. Buckalew, seeing him there, got into the carriage. Gritton and I both started to get in, too, but at the same time, and the door was not large enough. The Briton paused, stroked his moustache, and was indolently amazed at my ill-breeding. "Ah, Mr. Ripley, sir," he drawled. Twice before Nan had said, "Another time." I pinioned his arms to his side, and braced myself to swing him into the street. "A good one, Harry!" Phil yelled gleefully from the box. "Toss him a good one!" "Harry!" came Nan's voice from within the hack. It was a stricken .note of horror, or of what else, I can't say, except that there was that in it which made me drop Mr. Gritton like a hot poker. "Ah, imitating our little brother, eh?" said Gritton. I almost had him again, but Nan's head was thrust out the window. "Harry," she cried, in a kind of hysteria, "you oh yes you, you forget my obligations to Mr. Gritton." I drew back sullenly, and let him take the last seat in the carriage. "Harry, Harry, Harry!" she repeated, half-laughing, but angrily too. Her face showed pique. Would she have me, then, thrash him in spite of her? Or or could it be because I had let him take that last seat? Another time! Yet another time, and then I, like Phil, would outrun reproof. But no, she was, of course, angry because I had offered an indignity to her good protector. And, of course, I was in the wrong. I kntw I was at once, and felt it acutely, too. I shut the door for them; CREDITORS 237 slammed it, possibly, and they drove off without me. I made up my mind to get killed in the morning. I was deadly in earnest as to that. The chances were good, too. I wanted no more to do with girls, so it was best to get killed. Before morning Phil was back with us in the priest's house. He was not one to miss the supreme fight of all. Nan, he said, could explain nothing to her father as to the mysterious episode of the carriage. It had come for her, and that was all she knew. Gritton, however, fancied, y'know, that Yandell had recognised Nan after all, had discovered her new hiding place, had informed General Cos, and that General Cos had despatched carriage and Yandell to convey her to the Alamo or elsewhere in his power. But Gritton had answered their knocking at the door by knocking them down. "Yes, and Mr. Gritton," Nan had added, "was our good friend throughout." The old man, Phil said, had looked at her sharply as she said this. And then Phil had to look at me sharply, not knowing, of course, that I had decided to be killed within an hour or so. However, there were no more of us to be killed, just then. During the night we had barricaded doors and windows, and made loopholes, though they bombarded us frantically all the while. But at the first light of day, we discovered that we could shoot point blank into the barracks, or clear their walls, or, in other words, handle them on pretty fair terms. The citadel of dominion in Texas was just across the narrow street, at the throw of a lariat. This patch of stone and mud, gathered together a hundred years before by soldiers and friars, had been the sole man-made oasis in the space of wilderness. The sombre presidio, the moss-grown church, the mesquite huts for converted (?) Apaches, 238 THE LONE STAR here was the first stake of civilisation driven in all Texas. And now we later Texans had fought our way thus far to nail our own colours on this metaphorical flagstaff. There was matter here for an epitome of much history. But, ready and greedy that morning for the final struggle, we saw that the barracks were empty. The mutinous garrison had taken refuge in the Alamo. The whole town had fled there too, adding panic to insub- ordination. There was no more fight left in them. The cutthroat emblem of "No quarter" came down, and a white flag begging for mercy came out. And they had it, this assassin army fresh from the massacre of Zacate- cas. They had food, and aid for their hundreds wounded, and arms to defend themselves against the Indians on their march back to Mexico. They numbered fourteen hundred, though we scorned to count five hundred convicts brought in chains to reinforce them. They had lost fully three hundred killed. Scratch off the ciphers, and you have an idea of our own loss. It was a thorn that rankled in the Mexican race. General Cos, the Perfect Cuss, gave his word of honour that he would not again oppose the reestablish- ment of the Mexican constitution, for which we had just vanquished him, and we let him go. But he had no sooner crossed the Rio Grande than he began raising another army. He did not relish our demonstration of the personal equation: 300= 1,400 -f- stone walls -j- cannon, and there was no chivalry in him. Word of honour (sic) I As Mr. Austin had observed, Perfect Cuss was not an inaccurate translation. CHAPTER XXV A WORD WITH NAN WE NOW held Texas, we the Texans. Not a hostile bayonet remained. For the third, or fourth, or fifth time I lose count the Texans had won Texas. But we could picture the fury in the basilisk eyes of that affable Napoleon of the West down in Mexico, of the monstrously vainglorious Santa Ana who had never been whipped. How he must be writhing against acknowledgment of the personal equation! And his race with him, eight millions of people! He and they well, we had no doubt that they would try, by a false Santanistic logic, to prove the equation false, and quickly. The matter was a question of race now, and we few thousand American settlers were waiting for Santa Ana and his hordes, waiting as we heard his promise to leave only our bones on Texan soil. It was for the Murderer that we were waiting now. But having just driven the Mexicans across the border, and with the tingling flush of a good victory still in our veins, we were not overwhelmed by alarms. Besides, a few of us were having Christmas dinner with Deaf Smith, and in Deaf Smith's own home, which was an incongruous possession for the lone wandering scout. Deaf Smith's Mexican wife, buxom and voluble and kindly, sat at one end of the table, and Deaf Smith's little ones, chattering half-English, half-Spanish, flooded the house from back corral to front patio. In the "long room," or sala, they had a toy stable and manger, with little dolls as Mary and Joseph and the Child knocking 239 24 o THE LONE STAR there for shelter that was Latin-Mexican. And they had a Christmas tree and that was Anglo- American. We were eating our Christmas dinner in San Antonio, and we had made ourselves room for the eating of that Christmas dinner with our rifles. So we could not feel so terrifically impressed by Santa Ana's blood- thirsty promise. There would be time enough later to take that matter up. And meantime Mr. Austin was winning us sympathy throughout the States, sympathy coined into volunteers, from Georgia, from Alabama, from Tennessee, from Kentucky; into cannon from Ohio; into money and supplies from everywhere. And all this welcome aid we confidently expected by each ship to anchor at Copano, there below Goliad, at the gateway of Texas. "Oh I say," said Gritton, for he was there, and not an undistinguished guest, either, after his late good service to our cause, "I say, y'know," he demanded, lifting his drooping sandy lashes and looking at Nan across the table, "how did it happen now, Miss Buckalew, that you let me know nothing of your father organising his attack on Goliad?" "She outwitted you, y'know," was on my tongue, and stayed there. "For you see," he went on, lazily and patronisingly, "if I had known u'm'm well, if I had known that, we wouldn't have run away from those inventory persons at Mrs. Long's, or been-ah captured, y'know." Nan could not explain that it was because she had not trusted him, so she answered, "Because." But the piquant daring in her tone, daring him to upbraid her, ought to have been reassuring to the dense and lucky Briton, in the same degree that it was nothing of the kind for me. What was worse, she glanced my way out of the tail of her eye to see how I was taking it, and A WORD WITH NAN 241 Deaf Smith's lusciously browned wild turkey lost its flavour. "Moreover," Gritton continued languidly, dropping his imperceptible chin into his flabby neck, and his eyes to his plate, "the privilege of helping to take Goliad would have proved ah especially gratifying to me at this time, since," and his eyes shifted in sleepy challenge from Buckalew to Bowie, then to Deaf Smith, to the real men of our company, "since it appears that I am to be stationed at that gateway of Texas. You gentle- men have heard, I imagine, that our ah Honourable Council desires to appoint me collector of the port at Copano?" The Council, it should be explained, was a part of our provisional state government lately organised at San Felipe under the Mexican constitution. Representatives from each settlement composed the Council, and divided the functions of administration with the governor. But none of us had heard that Gritton was to be placed where the pressure of a finger might stop the very heart- beats on which our struggling cause depended for life. Bowie's deep gray eyes regarded the Englishman steadily. Those eyes had lost their old mocking daredeviltry. The lines of self-mastery were about the clean-cut mouth, and drew the handsome lean face to sober thought. The grief for wife and children lost was there plainly graven. Our Jim Bowie was hardly a well man. He suffered from a cold, which might be the beginning of the winter sickness. He looked at the Englishman steadily, musingly, but he made no comment. But Phil did. "The thunder you are! " said Phil, though no one had looked to him to say anything. The others frowned, perhaps at Phil's readiness of tongue, or possibly at his frank suspicion. Gritton's 242 THE LONE STAR loyalty was not a thing to be questioned now, and a boy's instinctive aversion could have no place in a mat- ter so grave. I should mention, though, that Nan did none of the frowning. Instead, her black eyes opened wide, and she turned on Phil inquiringly, evidently trying to probe her own instincts by means of his. Nor did Gritton frown. His eyebrows only lifted. He was lazily interested in Phil as a specimen. "Naturally then, Miss Buckalew," said Gritton, "I regret that those fifty men storming Goliad could not let me share in that night's glory. Eh, Mr. Ripley. sir, you would have, eh?" Abruptly Deaf Smith waved his long hunting- knife over the turkey. " More the bosom, sonny ? " he asked, and I passed my plate. Thus he saved me any indorsement of Mr. Gritton. "Glory? Sharing glory?" mumbled Old Man Buck- alew. "Brimstone and tinder boxes, Grit, you'll plaguy well have chance enough to get your fill, come next spring, and a heaping ladle of vinegar and lightning mixed in. Might help Doc Grant and the boys take Matamoras, f'r instance. As young Rip says, keep the war out of Texas for a spell," and he tried to scowl as he peered at me over his great specs. In other words, he was his old humbug self again, and as transparent as ever. I half suspected that he was playing me against Gritton with reference to Nan. Once he could eliminate the determined and dangerous Eng- lishman, my own elimination would come easy. Needless to state, I heartily endorsed the first part of his sly tactics. Nan, though, across there with her high Spanish comb and flashing black eyes, or as Davy Crockett might say, like a handsome piece of change- able silk, first one colour, then another, but always the clean thing, was sharp enough for both of us A WORD WITH NAN 243 together. Any time she spoke to Gritton, which happened unnecessarily often, there was a mischievous challenge my way from under her demure lashes. "But Mr. Gritton," she protested, "if you keep the Mexicans busy at Matamoras, then we'll miss it all here in San Antone." "In San Antone?" repeated Gritton, with a sudden- ness unusual in him. "You stay-ah in San Antone?" "Why of course, until spring, most likely. Aunt Jane here is going back to Goliad with the Grays, but as for getting to Nacogdoches while the rivers are rampag- ing and the trails only an endless hog-wallow No, sir, 7 stay right here with Mrs. Smith." "You stay here till spring?" said Gritton again. "Why not?" I demanded resentfully. I was think- ing, too, that San Antonio offered more chances than far-off Nacogdoches for my seeing Nan again soon. "Why not," I repeated, "since you say yourself that the Matamoras scheme will keep the Mexicans away from here?" Mr. Gritton very nearly frowned. It was at least a symptom of discomfiture. Under his dense exterior, as he gazed lazily and appreciatively at Nan, a struggle took place. But if there were any warning on his lips, a warning against Nan's remaining in San Antonio, some deeper motive prevented its utterance. "Ah, to be sure," he replied at last. "To be sure, where could there be danger, y'know? But if" and the appraisement of Nan's loveliness quickened in his bulby eyes "well, if Santa Ana ever does come it over us Fawncy now! and reaches San Antonio, then Miss Buckalew may count on her-ah devoted servitor not being far behind." For the littlest fraction of time, struck off by the quivering of an eyelash, I thought that Nan did not 244 THE LONE STAR like it. But the second after, I was not sure, because the taunting malice flashed again behind her lashes as she glanced swiftly to see how I liked this homage paid her by Mr. Gritton. Had I the man's drawling assur- ance, either of tongue or in certainty of performance, I might have indulged an impulse, and sworn that she could depend on me too, but there was nothing but to take it out in silent ill-humour. This humour, though, was not invisible to Nan, and she played wickedly on my mood, until she was a hundred-fold more vexatious than the little wild-fire elf I had first known and dreaded. She made that Christ- inas dinner synonymous with torment. Yet even so, the Christmas dinner was one that I would not have missed for anything that could be mentioned. While nearly all the settlers had scattered to their homes, I had stayed on after the siege because of this very feast ; which means, because of Nan. But I was leaving the same afternoon for my headright league on the Guadalupe, and here she was, not only indifferent to the grievous parting just ahead, but tolerating this man Gritton into the bargain. Yet the thought of up- braiding her was the last thing I should have dared. Besides, how could I know that that was precisely the very thing she was trying to provoke me to do? The dinner was over, and my horse was at the door, and still she had given me no chance for a word alone. At her own suggestion, indeed, which she voiced as a joyous inspiration, they all had to troop outside and see me mounted, and there to drink the stirrup cup. Their hearts were good, and there was that in their fare- well that went straight to my own. We sipped the eggnog to the bottom of the noggins, and Nan herself started to lead the way into the house. Fuming and reluctant, I waved my hand to them, jerked my bridle, A WORD WITH NAN 245 and started down the crooked street. But of course I had to look back, and there was Nan, and alone, in the doorway. And, just as though I had done aught to deserve remorse, the sight of her smote me. The slight figure of the little girl, her skirts blown by the cold wind, her eyes following me, and they were wide and dark and moist, and no wickedness left yes, I really thought that the independent little miss looked forlorn, and I had that pang of remorse. Optical illusions are often preposterous, you know. I jumped from my horse, gave the bridle to the first peon handy, and hurried back. But when I reached her, Gritton was there too, taking a pinch of snuff. He looked up, as though I had been gone for weeks and was forgotten. "Ah, Mr. Ripley, sir," he said drowsily. "Now I want to say, though, about those tentacles of the devil- fish, y'know. If they But no, you will let them squeeze no hint from you as to the Matamoras expedi- tion. Yet may we beg you again to be careful very, very careful Mr.-ah Ripley, sir?" Nan's eyes quickened hopefully, but I was not going to put myself in the wrong with this fellow a second time, and when no stinging retort answered him, a trace of scorn curled her lip. Yet, according to the optical illusion, she looked forlorn again. Why in the world couldn't she dismiss the insufferable bore? "Now those tentacles" continued the imperturbable Gritton, but he got no further, because at that moment the coach door of the house opened, and Phil appeared leading his horse into the street. "Oh, by the way, Mr. Gritton," said Phil, quick as a flash, "Miss Nan wishes me to ask you to come inside, sir." Gritton's hand jerked on his moustache. He looked 246 THE LONE STAR at Nan, not comprehending. Being there before him, she could not have sent the message. He was as dense as lead, but he was also as hard to cut as a diamond, with no angles, no point of impact. "That's what she wished me to say, sir," Phil repeated obstinately, seemingly oblivious that Nan was present. "What does the-ah fel he mean?" "Only this," said Nan, in a voice of rippling laughter, "he's really expressing my wishes, though how he guessed " "Now," said Gritton, "I say the deuce," and with phlegmatic assurance not in the least dented, he turned slowly and left me with Nan. "You see, Harry," said Phil, mounting, "I've decided to go with you after all. I'll just ride down to where your horse is, and wait for you." "But, young sir, not so fast!" cried Nan, and she ran to him, giving him her hand in farewell, and that brother of mine bent from his saddle and raised the hand to his lips. He looked slyly at me as he did it, and he whis- pered something low, which brought the flame into her cheeks. Then he was gone, and at last I could have a word with Nan. But I was suddenly taken with hope- less incompetence. Looking down at her, I quivered in the acute desire for a kiss, and I only stood there, awkwardly, restively, and awed at the daring of the thought. "Well, good-bye," she said wearily, though there was a note of growing anger in her voice. Now what could I have done in this last moment to offend her? But this much was certain: in the matter of a kiss, there was less to be ventured than ever. "Good-bye," I mumbled, not daring even to press her hand. The anger grew to the fury of tears. . IBP 'Well, good-bye,' she said wearily" A WORD WITH NAN 247 "Oh, good-bye!" she cried, and turned swiftly into the house. "Wait!" I shouted desperately, and was suddenly very brave, but the door had slammed behind her. I joined Phil in a very glum mood. "Well?" said he, as we rode out of the town. "Well what?" "Well oh, you know, just well? How well? Was she good to you?" "She's a girl," I replied crossly. "But " "Oh shut up, Phil, and tell me why aren't you going on with your Grays to Goliad." "Time enough to meet them there later. I want to see more of you, Harry, and your ranch, and Yappe, and old L'fitte. Now about Miss Nan " "Nan's a girl," I repeated dismally. "There's no understanding her. She's mad as a hornet, though about what " "What did you do, then?" "I didn't do anything, except say good-bye." Phil looked at me quickly, scornfully, Then he whistled. "For Heaven's sake, stop it!" I commanded. "Do you know, Harry," answered Phil with deliber- ate fervour, "that you are one plum' idiot?" "Look here, what did you tell her just now, that made her cheeks so red?" "Well," said Phil, "that's probably what." "What's what?" "About the plum' idiot." Still, that ought not to have made her cheeks so red. CHAPTER XXVI DISCORD GLEAMING ivory against ebon, the expanse of white in a pair of eyes, high-pitched laughter and stuttering lingo, of such was the joy of my nigger Yappe when Phil and I ended our two days' journey through driving sleet and hailed him from the bank of the Guadalupe. He ferried us across in a new flatboat of his own making, and then there was L'fitte too, all yelps and leaps and low whines. And again, the Peasantry, who were as delighted as children that I had not been killed while killing their fellow country- men. All this made for the blessedness of home, which is the welcome awaiting one there. Phil and I knew the feeling as the door of my cabin opened, and the bleak roaring of the storm mellowed to the cheery roar of the hearth. Yappe stripped us of our cloaks and boots and dripping clothes, and coddled us in bear rugs, and we ate and drank what he brought, and afterward we smoked and talked of my landed estate. After a time it began to grow on us that Yappe's manner was flustered, and that the same was slowly getting the better of his joy in us. Before long, indeed, he must explode, so I opened the valve by calling for his report as majordomo. And that report, coming from a majordomo, was unique. Yappe had been laying up remonstrance for a long time, and now he vented it all as fast as the wrathful words could race and tumble. "An* yo' pa wuz jes* de same way," he vociferated. 248 DISCORD 249 "De same way, xactly, jes' a spen'frist blade, 'long o' Gen'ul Long an' ennybody 'et come an* ast him fo' his house an' home. An' heah you, Mah's Harry, sign awduhs fo' de Ahmy o' de People, an' heah come gemmen wif dem frum Majah Val'tine Bennet, quahtuhmah's gen'ul, an' dey took all de cawn, an' po'k, an' hawgs, an' cattle, an' hawses we got. Yassuh, an' de ahs'nul too, an' down to de las' deuh skin fo' brogans. An* wha' we got lef, Mah's Harry? Yassuh, we got ru'na- tion stah'un us in de face; an' you, Mah's Baby Phil, don' you laugh nuther!" We had yet something else, too, and Yappe told us of it defiantly, rather hoping that I would chop his head off. He meant that we had enough seed corn for the next planting, which he had hidden from our commis- sariat agents. He had started his ploughing already, and looking out the window, we saw that there would be enough more corn to feed a regiment. Involuntarily we had gotten the habit of calculating cornfields in terms of regiments. Altogether, Yappe put me in a happy frame of mind. I had been sensitive about my poor offerings, but the Army of the People had not scorned them after all. And here was Yappe's new crop promising fine for next spring. But yet more exalted sensations were to be mine when Phil and I rode into Gonzales a few days later. I wanted to enlist in the regular army which Sam Houston, as commander-in-chief under our provisional government, was then organising at San Felipe to oppose Santa Ana in the spring. But at Gonzales there was news that started my heart to fluttering like a duck in a puddle, as Davy Crockett would say. Most of my old neighbours of the settlement had returned to their farms after the siege, and there were 250 THE LONE STAR a number of them in Gonzales as Phil and I rode through the street of grass and mud up to Captain Al Martin's store. "Land of freedom and fiddlesticks, if it ain't Paul Revere!" cried the chubby captain, pushing him- self to his feet from the top of a barrel, and appearing in the door with his coonskin vest tightly buttoned against the cold wind and his shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbow. From the tops of other barrels and kegs there emerged also the grisly misanthrope, Jack Castle- man, and lean Alcalde Zeke Williams with his sharp nose and wiry goatee, and the big, soft-voiced Major Kerr, and Old Paint Matt Caldwell, now captain, and Val Bennet, now major, and Plcido Benevides from De Leon's, now captain, who had led one of Johnson's companies in the assault on San Antonio. Caldwell and Bennet had been in the same affair, so that we were all companions in arms as well as neighbours. But I had come to regard the gatherings of these planters in Al Martin's store as a gathering of the nation in embryo, and now, when they burst forth with their news, the ring of it in my ears was certainly like the call of a nation. "Now we've cotched you, sonny," announced Jack Castleman, spitting tobacco and distilling vinegar, "ye've got to understand that we've done gone and voted you inter th' Council." And that was the news! They had made me a part of the first American government in Texas! "You see," Martin explained, "we know as how you want to keep the scrape out o' Texas; and, by the Dogs of War and all their yellow pups south o' the Rio Grande, we do too. And we mean to lick 'em in their own kennels. But while we're away doing it, we want a man to back us up in the Council. The Governor is DISCORD 251 getting stubborn already, and it's for the Council to set him right." "But how," I stammered, all flushed with pleasure, "how'd you come to think that I " "Now none of your worrying about that," said Bennet. "We begun to settle on you even back in San Antone. Doc Grant himself spoke of you, and that other Brit- isher who risked his neck bringing us the information that led to the assault, he " "You mean that Gritton spoke of me too?" "Yes, and about the first one, 's far's I can recollect. He fawncied, y' know, that you were the very fellah or the Council." "Now Rip," said Cal dwell in his most plaintive Tennessee, "hit air a case o" Paul Revere agin. We 'p'int you to do the work, whilst we mosey off to Mata- moras fer the high jinks." But at Gritton's instigation? There was the sting in the honey Well, no matter. I was a member of the Council now, a man among men, and men had chosen me. What difference could Gritton make? "Anyway, I don't like it, Harry," said Phil, though the boy was proud for me over the astounding honour. We parted, my brother and I, that same day, he to rejoin his company at Goliad, and I to go on to San Felipe with Major Kerr, who had been elected to the Council by the planters of Matagorda. By the first of the year we had formally taken our seats in the Council Hall. The seats were hide-bottom chairs, the Hall a log house without ceiling or plaster, whose windows were glazed in canvas to shut out the cold. But there was parliament, congress, self-government, and we, representing the thirteen settlements happy analogy to the Thirteen Colonies cherished a high sense of our duties. We named a municipality after gallant old 252 THE LONE STAR Ben Milam. We bought two schooners to start a navy. We lighted patriotic fires by proclamation and appeal, or tried to. But the Texans were lethargic. They could not believe that Santa Ana would risk insurrection behind his back, and if he did, what more easy than to crush him like a fly ? The inrush of volunteers from the States stopped also, as we could not raise the money to support them. Austin had impoverished himself. So had the few other Texans of means. The only thing, then, was to make the enemy contribute. We simply had to take Matamoras. Besides, we were fighting the Mexican fight. As Mr. Austin himself had urged, we must at least give the Mexicans a chance to help us defend their own constitution. Meantime we frowned on secession talk at home, though those rampant youngsters down at Goliad went and declared for independence notwithstanding. I entered on my duties in time to help the Council receive an affable communication from the Governor, in which we were described as fruit of the gallows tree ; and then We, the Council, decreed the Governor out of the gubernatorial chair. So there was a difference of opinion already. The Governor did not want Gritton appointed collector of the port at Copano, but the Council had appointed him anyhow. The Governor had favoured the Matamoras expedition, and Houston, commander-in-chief, had issued orders to Bowie on that line, and now both had changed their minds ; while We, the Council, had not. The Governor was an amiable fleshy Kentucky gentleman named Henry Smith, who had come from Missouri with Austin and served as alcalde at Brazoria, but now he was pigheaded, and We, the Council, were very arrogant with him. We went over his head, and Houston's too, and directed Colonel Fannin at DISCORD 253 Goliad to hurry up that Matamoras expedition. Whereat Colonel Fannin desired to run things too, he being a West Pointer. Fannin was an eloquent, patriotic, fire-eating Georgian, and ambitious. Also there was Colonel Frank Johnson, who was an impulsive Virginian, and not discreet. He had led that superb assault on San Antonio after Milam's death, and now we wanted him to cooperate with Fannin. Consequently , and very naturally, each colonel set himself up as com- mander-in-chief on his own account. And as though three of them were not enough, Dr. Grant made it known that he was acting commander-in-chief, after which he led out all the volunteers who would follow him from San Antonio, took what horses he could from Johnson and Fannin, and went off scouring the cacti for more. Our total forces in Texas did not number eight hundred men, and any disaster to the two hundred with Grant might well be fatal to our hopes, so We, the Council, were forced to support Grant along with Fannin and Johnson. Now Sam Houston had his own ideas about stationing troops to meet Santa Ana in the spring, but as he ran into another commander-in-chief at each turn, he appealed to the deposed Governor. The deposed Governor could only give him a furlough, which the superbly enraged Sam Houston employed in persuading the Indians to keep off the warpath. Thus We, the Council, and we, Council, Governor, commanders-in- chief, and many other loyal Texans, stupidly laid Texas naked to the invader's sword. Ah me, I must have taken myself seriously in those days! I'm afraid I gave the impression of being half-baked. In looking back on myself, I see the uncompleted pose, the ludicrous striving for adjustment in the world of men. And as a member of the Council, I thought myself at last a man among 254 THE LONE STAR men, and I was not going to let myself forget that the pigheaded Governor and the enraged Houston were only men too. I had not realised before, you see, how very old I was; that I was actually twenty-three. Thus the pendulum swung from diffidence to obstinacy, and obstinacy I mistook for strength. I disdained the Governor and Houston for changing their minds. I fretted when they argued that the Matamoras scheme involved a march over deserts without a commissary, without horses, without money, and with only a few hundred men. Yet how laboriously did I sweat over each measure, and with what ponderous decision did I cast my vote! I suspect that I had a vague notion of being an organiser of victory while labouring over charts with furrowed brow, figuring out where to give battle, what terms to grant the vanquished, and torturing every thought, every moment, for the Texas I had made my own country. But one day a letter came from my father. We had established the first mail service in Texas, and I had been writing home regularly, and my father, no doubt, had read between the weighty lines. He was then in Congress, and some teamsters with a train of provisions subscribed in Natchitoches, La., brought me his letter. And in it were these words, laid like a whip across the raw flesh of vanity: "Look here, son, hadn't you better think a little more of Texas, and less of yourself? Try it!" The smart of the reproof lay first in the sense that it was not deserved; then, little by little, in the sense that it was deserved. I began to understand that I harmonised as badly with the universe in my over- weening cocksureness as before in my diffidence, and this old-fashioned parental scolding jolted me back to the old receptive attitude of being willing to learn. DISCORD 255 So I tried to think less of my own opinions, and more of Texas. But there was already the whirlwind to reap. One day toward the last of February Sam Houston, and Deaf Smith behind him, came riding into San Felipe like all the demons, and threw themselves from steaming horses before the log cabin that we called the Executive Mansion. We, the Council, had been dropping away until there was barely a quorum left, but the few of us huddled around the fire in the Council Hall knew from Houston's towering fury that his news was of the blackest. Nor did we have to wait long. Directly he burst in on us, he and Deaf Smith and the Governor, the latter white to the lips. The domineering Houston glowered at one man and then another. His lofty spirit was warped and frenzied. He wanted a brawl then and there. His great chest heaved, throbbing veins purpled his lionlike countenance, and for the invective choking him, he could not speak at first. He dashed his military cap on the table, and tossed back the old blue coat he wore until its blood red lining flaunted us as a challenge. "Now, by all eternal damnation," he roared, "are you satisfied? Are you, honourable gentlemen of the Council Bah, you dam' rascals, suppose you stop him now." We were on our feet, but not for his abuse. "Stop who?" we stammered. "Who?" he shouted. "Who, but the great earth- shaker, the man on whom black fates attend! Who, but Sant' Ana himself! As well one despot as a dozen, though, and now you've brought Sant' Ana on us. Deaf Smith here can tell you that he's crossed the Rio Grande, and the Eternal knows how many thousand yellow imps crowd behind him, drawing lots already for our women, murdering every white man, bringing their convicts to 256 THE LONE STAR settle in our homes after us. Speak up, honourable bunglers of the Council, are you satisfied with your work? Abyss of hell, without your outrageous usurpa- tion I'd now be on the frontier, and an army behind me to meet them. But no, Sam Houston gives way, O chiefs of race divine, that you may by one god-like blow crush this viper overnight." "There's there's Grant?" one of us faltered. Houston flung out his powerful arms. "Ha, the acting commander-in-chief," he sneered. "The ringleader of your lawless, reckless, piratical expedition against Matamoras. As if Mexicans have not been fortified there for weeks. As if your slimy Mr. Gritton, your honourable collector of the port at Copano, had not advised them I As if your marauding horse-thieves got any further than the mesquite flats bah!" " But Grant?" we demanded. Houston folded his arms, and his lips pressed together until there was no blood left in them. "They tied Grant," he said, "to a wild mustang, to the tail and hind hoofs. They called that a passport home. So much for one brave meddler wasted, though he was the best spared." Deaf Smith growled low, and turned to the window. A palsied shiver passed over the Governor. A member of the Council drove his boot among the blazing logs, as though he were kicking a dog. "And and those with Grant?" he asked. "Ambushed, sir! Sixty all told, all who would not listen when I begged them not to follow the horse- thief Grant. But Placido Benevides escaped. You can ask him." "And Johnson?" "Ambushed also, though Johnson and three others DISCORD 257 saved themselves. That makes one hundred men lost to Texas already." His voice of thunder broke as he told us that. There was a third question trembling on our lips, but we lacked the courage to ask more. If the answer should be still the same! But I thought of Phil, and I could endure it no longer. "And those at Goliad?" I begged. "Those with Fannin?" "Yes, yes," said Houston, the storm of his wrath gathering anew, "let us not forget that there's yet another commander-in-chief, though this one, Fannin, does nothing except to -plan to sail to Matamoras, except to gather every freshly landed volunteer to himself at Goliad. And there they are starving now, poor boys, and freezing too, and as for fighting, they haven't powder or shot. By Heaven, why do the provision ships from the States fail to come in this hour of our direst need? Tell me that, gentlemen. Tell me why they never reach Copano. Tell me how it happens that they are captured by Mexican privateers. Ex- plain, if you can, the very excellent bureau of informa- tion that the Mexicans appear to have at Copano. You, Ripley, can you explain that? But there, you need not try. The question is between you and your country, boy. Between you and your God." "It is, sir, it is!" I cried. "Because because my brother is at Goliad." My anguish was a new note, and Houston paused as a caged lion before an unfamiliar touch of colour. When he spoke again, he was no less stern, but his voice had softened a little. "The worse for us then," he said, "that you are not there in your brother's place, and in the place of the four hundred other brave fellows that Texas may lose. An 258 THE LONE STAR army division is marching against them now, and Sant' Ana himself with four thousand men is hurrying to San Antonio. I have sent Bowie and Travis there to San Antone, and they have just one hundred and fifty men. A hundred and fifty half-naked men, gentlemen of the Council, to stop that overwhelming horde! And in the rest of Texas, even to the Louisiana line, there's not a corporal's guard. Give me language, Heaven, to express my anguish of soul! Deaf Smith tells me that this scaly serpent, this crafty Napoleon of the West, is distributing arms among renegade Texians. But we, gentlemen, with our cursed dissensions, we have helped him more than traitors. That dire sister of the slaughtering power, Discord, has betrayed Texas to his vengeance. And now, honourable and magnificent architects of victory, what are you going to do about it? The most of you have run away from your mischief- making posts, cringing before the wrath of the people in their convention next month. But until then, what? What shall we do for a government, for a commander- in-chief ? Or does any gentleman care to suggest that, by the will of the people, Sam Houston is not still their commander-in-chief ? " Not one cared to lift the gauntlet. We were, I think, even grateful that he had returned. We were relieved, too. His huge determination, his domineering will, the masterful force of the man despite his theatric, bull-like rage, these gave us a staunch anchor chain in the hour of despair. "Will you," I pleaded, "will you send me to San Antone with your orders?" "Orders, sir, orders? How do you know that I have any orders?" "You should have, sir. But if not " If not, I would go in any case. Nan was there, and DISCORD 259 that was enough. But Santa Ana would be there too, which was hideously more than enough, and I meant to do what I could to save Nan from him. Then there was another thing, though I had none of the ready. tongue to say it; which was, that deep within me I was resolved to use my rifle, my pistols, my knife, my bare hands, so long as the power to strike was left in me, so long as God would let me account for yet one more of the invaders I had helped to bring on Texas. Declaimings like these sound foolish, but I did not make them even to myself. The resolve was simply there, and I was acting on it as naturally as when a hungry man seeks food. There was no other way to settle the score with my manhood. It could count miserably little for Texas against my costly blundering, but that little, along with my death, might possibly count toward redemption. "Have you reflected," said Houston, "that at San Antone you will find our brave men, wounded in the battles of Texas and sick from exposure in her cause, who have been stripped of their blankets, even of their medicines, by your Dr. Grant? Have you considered the welcome a member of the Council might receive from men in their present dangerous mood?" "You will send me then?" "Wait. I have this despatch from Travis: 'For God's sake, and for the sake of our country, send us reinforcements!' Do you think that you would like to tell Travis for me that I have no reinforcements, due to the treasonable usurpation of the honourable Council?" "I'll contradict nothing. Only send me." "And if I do, will you do what I tell you?" "I Will try." "Will you repeat my orders, whatever they are?" "If I reach there, sir." "'If? 'If? By the Eternal, our infallible Council is 260 THE LONE STAR suddenly filled with 'ifs'! But there's something better than an 'if in your face, boy. Here then, you are to tell Bowie and Travis to blow up the Alamo bring off the guns and fall back on Gonzales." "Abandon the Alamo?" we cried aghast. "But general, you're laying us open to invasion! But " " 'Buts', " cried Houston, "are worse than 'ifs.' I'm making the best of your mess, and we've got to save those men, and those at Goliad too. Afterward we'll think about fighting." "But General " It was the Council's last ditch of obstinacy. Houston turned his back on their clamour, and swung round on me inquiringly. "Write out your orders, sir," I said, "and I'll take them." CHAPTER XXVII UNDER A BLACK LACE MANTILLA THAT ride from San Felipe to San Antonio was the hardest of my life and the least sparing. I calcu- lated nothing as to fords and ferries, but went down into the swollen rivers wherever I struck them, holding to my horse's tail as both of us swam, and coming out on the other bank with face and hands cut by thin sheets of ice. I hardly stopped until at my own ranch on the Guadalupe, where I took my first full night's sleep, granted me out of the mercy of pure exhaustion, rested my horse, and by some prophetic inspiration tied behind my saddle a long, black, velvet-faced Spanish cloak that I had bought in Mexico. Pushing on westward, I crossed Cibolo creek by mid- afternoon of the next day, and then spurred my jaded horse on to the crest of a low-rolling hill, for ahead of me I heard the dull boom of cannon. Here I could see San Antonio not fifteen miles away, and puff-balls of white smoke darting up above the cluster of trees and jumble of coloured block-like houses. That could mean one thing only, but my more instant concern was given to a lone horseman racing like mad from the town toward me. A troop of cavalry midway on the plain behind him had just given up the chase, but the fugitive's haste never abated. He seemed indifferent whether they followed him or not. As he galloped nearer, I recognised the plaintive Tennessean, Old Paint Caldwell. "Yes," he panted, bringing his steed to its haunches, 261 262 THE LONE STAR "they hev shore come, Sant 1 Annie hisself, an' nigh all his Santanistas, an' nothin' to hender. We didn't hev no bosses even fer scoutin' Doc Grant took 'em all so's we didn't know the Mex'kins wuz near 'tell one o' the boys axually seen 'em frum the chu'ch tower, an' we skeercely hed time to run fer it into the Alamo. Them's partly our guns you air hearin' now, an' hit's been jes* stiddy bombardment fer twenty-fo' hours. Travis blazed away the fust when they mentioned surrender, and he's aimin' to fire another every sun-up long ez thar's a man alive to do it." " But you, Paint, running away?" "Yep, running fer he'p. To Gunzalus fust. Then on to the Brazos. They'ull be holdin' a conven- tion thar, signin' up a Declaration uv Independence more'n likely, which I hope to sign myself, but mebbe they'ull adjourn to come an' he'p fight. South Ca'linah [man name o' Bonham hez gone to fetch the boys at Goliad. Right about face, now, Rip, an' we'ull " "No," I said dully, clasping his hand and starting my horse past him, "I've got Houston's orders. He wants them to save themselves." ' ' Ef Sam Houston ' 'began Old Paint. ' ' But he don't know 'em, thet's all!" "Still they can get out, can't they?" " O' cohse they kin git out, but ef Sam Houston j edges thet them boys will step out of Sant' Annie's path, an' JDOW an' scrape, an' ax him to please to go ahead and sweep like fire an' sword an' wolves clean to the Sabine, w'y " But they could get out, they could obey Houston's orders, and I must try to deliver those orders. "Now yo* gittin' in," objected Old Paint, "thar's a diffrunt question. No, 'tain't even a question. Hit's UNDER A BLACK LACE MANTILLA 263 downright idjicy. So come along now, Rip. Come along with me." "Good-bye, Paint," I said mechanically, and left him still grumbling. I calculated laboriously how not to be caught, and yet how to draw nearer the clutches of the Mexicans. The sheltering fringe of trees marking the little San Antonio River gave me an idea to work from, because there was shade for hiding, and on one bank, just east and across from the town, were the old mission buildings of the Alamo. I must win my way there to deliver Hous- ton's message. Perhaps Nan was there too, but if not Well, I tried to put the thought from me. Santa Ana had beaten me to the town, and my first hope of get- ting her away was now out of the question. While daylight lasted I made a long detour to the south, and came by night to Juan Seguin's rancho, which bordered the river some two miles below the town. Seguin was one of our few Mexican sympathisers, and had already joined us with a company of rancheros. Naturally, then, Santa Ana had stripped bare his fields, barns, and corrals, but luckily for me, the place was now deserted. I put up my horse in one of the corrals, leaving him water and the little fodder I could gather, and then set out on foot toward the Alamo. It was very dark along the low river bank, and where there were no pecan groves, I kept to the underbrush. Then I found a skiff, which was staked to the bank near some Mexican's quinta and summer-house. The boat would give me the advantage of either bank in case I was challenged, and a moment later I was paddling stealthily up the crooked little stream through reeds and water lilies, choosing a course where overhanging branches made denser the night. The willows or tule switched back into my face, or hanging moss brushed creepily, 264 THE LONE STAR like spiders, across my eyes. The droning hum of all the water people made the silence more ghostly but now and again a spasm of cannonading ahead roused every sense anew to the treachery of this dank calm gloom around me. My course was a constant winding and turning through the old abandoned irrigated ranches of the early Spaniards, and at last the howling of mongrel dogs around native huts of mesquite warned me that I was twisting fairly into the ragged skirts of the town itself. I passed the mouth of a ruined ditch which had served the Conquistadores a century and a half for irrigation, and from its width I knew it must be the Acequia Concepcidn. This was a definite landmark, and I was now within a quarter of a mile of the Alamo. But as I rounded the next turn a hoarse ''Alto alii!" ripped the dead silence to tatters. I could not see the picket, nor he me, but he was on the Alamo bank, and when others came running at his call, I under- stood that they were blockading the Alamo against outside communication. I was forced, therefore, to point the skiff toward the bank nearest the town. The sentinels had ceased their questions and chattering, and everything was again as quiet as though there had been no alarm at all, but I knew that off there under the trees they were listening their very hardest. And then a rush had to bend before the nose of the skiff, and switch itself free from under the keel with a sharp hiss. Instantly one of the sentries fired. I had already decided what to do if that happened, so it is no marvel that I did it quickly as thought, which was to give one piercing cry, throw my cloak to the bank, and tip over the boat with a loud splash. After that followed the silence of the grave. I had landed in water up to my armpits, and there I stood, not even lifting UNDER A BLACK LACE MANTILLA 265 my hands against the gnats stinging my face. The Mexican pickets were chattering at a great rate, telling one another to hush and listen. He who had fired maintained that I was dead, maintained it querulously, boastingly. Then there was an exclamation, and the word "bote." They had captured the overturned skiff, which the current at the bend had drifted over to them. It was more evidence, more argument, for my slayer, and after an age the others agreed with him. At least they had kept me from the Alamo side, which was enough in the way of duty, and they separated quite well content with themselves. I could hear their vivas near and far as they patrolled the bank. So there was no getting across just then. But there was no need, either, of standing longer in the water, and I slid one foot past the other, being careful not to entangle them in the roots, and at last emerged on the low bank. Here I sat down on my cloak, and tried to figure hope out of failure. But a new peril quickly made me move. The sentries on the opposite bank were being relieved, and two of them had taken it into their heads to cross over to the town in my skiff. I could hear them putting it to rights, and soon the creaking of the oarlocks. They were coming straight toward me, and I could only fall back before them, if even into the town. But as I went, I wrapped myself in the cloak, glad now that it was a cloak, and like the Mexicans who fear the blessed cold air, I threw an end across my chest up over my mouth and nose. Let Heaven grant for once that I might be taken for a Mexican! The very first thing a dog projected himself and many yelps from a jacal, and deciding that I was lost, I kicked at him for pure chagrin. But a blanketed Mexican passing by laughed sympathetically. To kick lustily, a66 THE LONE STAR to mutter guttural Spanish oaths, here was my passport, and I pushed on farther into the town, thinking that each footstep behind me must belong to the sentinels. The crazy pathway grew to a narrow, crooked street. The jacals became continuous walls, of sun-dried brick, of stucco facades, of stone. The Old World town that night was confusion and movement and shrill noises. San Antonio was doubling her sleepy population by the swarthy army that had trudged far and wearily, six hundred miles through the wintry chill, and were now sullenly boisterous in the joy of arriving. Their women were with them, and these were commadres already with the rebosa-hoodod dames of the mesquite huts. There were torches flitting up and down the dark streets. There were carts and oxen and pack-mules, and squads tramping to the barracks, and officers on horseback clattering everywhere, swearing as they had been sworn at by their chiefs. There were other cloaked figures, too, of citizens skulking timorously, and I drew no scrutiny on myself. Now and then a candle light from behind barred windows cast a faint glow out on the street, but I quickened my steps through these areas of danger. I could not resist, however, stealing glances at the faces behind the bars. Curiosity widened heavily lashed eyes. The invasion of so many gallant cavaliers from the capital promised festivity, life; and the Mexican daughters of gay old San Antonio were expectant. Often the eyes were pretty, too, and ravishing, but it required a certain beautiful black pair to make me stare, to falter in my course, and forget the risk. The girl was peering out musingly, even gloomily, and her face in the half-light, partly shrouded by a black lace mantilla over her head, had the softness, the witchery, the lure of mystery. My heart stopped right there. But this was not all. UNDER A BLACK LACE MANTILLA 267 Those fine black eyes quickened as I came in the patch of light before her window, and they met my own over my cloak. "Harry!" The low-whispered cry brought me up sharply. Now I recognised the house. It was Deaf Smith's. And the girl was Nan, She slipped from the window, the door opened, and there she was. "In here, Harry, quick!" My impulse was to gain that haven. The command was subtle, too. But to reach the Alamo I must do it at night, and this night was better than another, for in the Alamo they must know Houston's orders before more of Santa Ana's thousands hemmed them round. Be- sides, now as well as another time, I must give over all thoughts of Nan. I wanted to do what I had to do, which involved the business of dying, without having this brave girl's reproaches added to the scorpion of conscience. I stopped rigid on the threshold, and hid her from the street behind my cloaked figure. "I can't," I whis- pered, "and don't ask me again. But tell me, why didn't you at least go to the Alamo?" She laughed softly, taunting my anxiety. "Never fear," she said. "I'm safe here with Deaf Smith's wife. You yourself took me for a Mexican just now? Hear those guitars up the street? It's a fandango, and I'll bet you I could go in there, and " No, and for God's sake, Nan, keep out of the window! Even a Mexican girl isn't safe with eyes like yours." She gasped, but I was too angry to intend compliments. "I can't see without eyes, you know," she objected demurely. "And I must, I must watch for Daddy. He may come, and Oh Harry, if he should! My poor Daddy!" 268 THE LONE STAR "But where is he?" "As if I knew! He was out on a scout Listen, I hear soldiers marching this way. Oh quick, quick, come in!" But I was stricken with the thought that now I must leave her. I caught her hand, and at the touch of that warm trembling hand, I no more knew what I did, nor cared, but I seized her round the shoulders and pressed her close, and so savagely that she gave a little smothered cry of pain. Then, with the fever of her crushed lips in mine, and coursing hence through my veins, I turned blindly away. Ahead of me up the street was the fandango. The clicking of castanets, the rollicking laughter of girls, the joviality of men, had gathered a crowd of loiter- ers into the light flooding from the doors of the place. If I continued that way, I should have to pass through them. But as I started in the other direction, a column of infantry swung into the street toward me. Their bayonets gleamed in the light of torches, and I could see that they formed a hollow square, within which marched a prisoner. I dared not go that way either. "Here, Harry, here!" whispered Nan, holding open her door. But if I darted in now, the officers of the approaching column might see, and suspect a fugitive, which would mean a search of the house and the finding of Nan. Eluding the girl's outstretched hand, I made off in the direction of the fandango. Once there, I began working with elbows through the crowd, and was almost past the glare when I all but pushed against that hulk of a brute whom you know as Lush Yandell. He was in the crowd right in front, his misshapen hairy head cocked to one side, and his one leering eye intent on the scene within. He blocked completely the refuge of the dark street beyond, and turning swiftly Iqst he UNDER A BLACK LACE MANTILLA 269 notice me and snatch the cloak from my face, I turned squarely into the open doors of the dance-house. The revelry was gay and furious in the large patio. It was the scene over again of the old Spanish cavaliers, roughened by the wilderness of Texas, who used to bless this mission town of the chaste saint as a haven for wild gallantry unfettered. The cavaliers now were narrow- chested Mexicans in gaudy regimentals. Their hands shook on wine glasses held high. Their voices cracked as they cheered two girls dancing the jota. All were insolent-eyed and swaggering. Some were reeling. Tarnished youths of the town and young hacendados posed with an air as hosts to these dashing musketeers, and did not wish it overlooked that they also were hardened rakes who knew a thing or two. Among them I sauntered like a conspirator of the conventions, feigning a pose of my own; of indifference, of an habitue". I might have been looking for a friend, perhaps the last possession I should look for there. A door, a likely door, was more to my mind. There were many doors opening on the patio, but each was only another vista of the mad revelry everywhere. Then I came to one before which stood two dragoons with bared swords. Everybody that passed this door gazed curiously within, especially the gilded youths and the girls. Some lingered until a frown from the dragoons warned them on. I also looked in, but the scene was as elsewhere. A swart and gorgeously decor- ated Mexican, a pompous, clean-shaven fellow with lustful eyes, was half-reclining on a couch, and raising a champagne glass to the lips of a pert and highly elated girl in short yellow skirt, red bodice, and slippers with red heels. She sat beside him. Another girl sat at his other side. No, the scene was not uncommon here. But the man himself was. He resembled a 2 ;o THE LONE STAR sullen-browed Roman emperor at a drunken feast. And more, this man lolling in this debauchery was the President General of Mexico, His Excellency of the Superlative Degree, Santa Ana himself. I drew back quickly into the gay throng, and that only in time to avoid a column of infantry that came tramping in across the patio. It was the same column that was behind me in the street, that had forced me into this place. I knew, because the formation was still a hollow square, and there within marched the prisoner. He wore a long great coat, with checks of green and gray. He blinked at the many lights with a wearied expression of boredom, and he indolently fondled his moustache as his guard drew up before the door of the President General and motioned him to enter. "A-h" he drawled, in a tone faintly sceptical. "Ah yes, to be sure." CHAPTER XXVIII BLISS DEFERRED IF CAUGHT, I must suffer as a spy in any case, so it was as well to try for what might be gained by spying. Moreover, the temptation in seeing the rapier play, or the play of bludgeons, between two such an- tagonists as the crafty Hombre Funesto of Mexico and the densely oblivious Gritton, drew me to my peril as the coil of a python. It was a drama of fascination, of poison, not to be resisted. Since Gritton was a prisoner, then he could not have been the traitor at Copano that Houston supposed; and that being so, and I got safely away, possibly I might be able to help him through learning more of his predicament. Many of the revel- lers, girls hushing their shrill laughter and tipsy young hacendados, were crowding before His Excellency's door in morbid curiosity over the prisoner's fate. However, there was another door opening on the scene from an inner room, which was also crowded: but this inner room, or ante-sola, was dimly lighted, and to it I made my way. Here, by looking over the heads of those in front, I could see what was passing. Wrath at sight of the languid Gritton had brought Santa Ana to his feet, and he was champing in the beetle-browed fury that one connects with sullen Roman emperors who are roused. A table overturned, a champagne bottle, and shards of glass littered the cement floor around his spurred boots. The two girls in yellow and red were cowering before the malevolent change from soft debauchery to murderous anger. 271 272 THE LONE STAR But Santa Ana looked only on his prey, and the lust in his round quickening eyes was now the lust of wolfish hunger. He meant to rend the Englishman's flesh, to gloat in the warmth and odour of steaming blood. The Englishman, meantime, stood with feet apart, and lazily regarded the President General-in-Chief with an appreciative stare. And all the while, off in the patio, the castanets clicked to quick time, and a woman's voice was singing the words to the jota, clear and high, and languorously sensuous. "So, senor," cried the President, "so, and I myself, the Supreme Power, must come and undo your work, eh? And did you imagine, perhaps, that you could betray this very town to the Americans, to the land pirates, and yet hide your perfidy from me, your master?" Gritton's sandy lashes twitched in the least, and he took a pinch of snuff. Then, as an afterthought, he offered the box to the President. It was superb and studied insult; that is, if one could suspect Gritton of the effort required. " Dios mio," he drawled, in the tone of "re-ahly now." Gritton mispronounced Spanish as flatly as he did English broadly, but the irritating effect was the same. "Ah si, de veras, now I do recall knocking down various instances of Your Excellency's Houndsditch warriors. They smelled badly, you know, very. And in addition, they were ambitious. They really wished to carry off a-ah a young woman under my protection. But no, I cannot imagine," he simmered affably, "that Your Excellency should confound the loss of a-ah young woman with the loss of the town." The illustrious potentate, a head shorter than his lank tormentor, broke from his stern pose, and raged up and down the room like a baited bull; sword, spurs, and medals all jangling menace. He halted abruptly. BLISS DEFERRED 273 and as he turned on Gritton, his hand trembled on the hilt of his sword until the blade rattled in its scabbard. "Our bargain, senor, our bargain!" he snarled. "Or must I call Almonte to witness? Or the fellow Yandell, just outside there?" Gritton pondered gravely. "No," he replied, "we are a crowd now, you and I." "Our bargain, senor. Speak to the bargain!" Gritton calmly threw off his ulster, and sat down. "Ah yes, the bargain," he said, cumbrously putting himself to the effort of recollection. "Yes, when I am free again, it will give me more pleasure than Your Excellency can suspect to deliver according to-ah contract. Divers bleeding noses the Houndsditch war- riors, remember? were small cost to pay for the con- fidence of these Texan Americans; a mere bagatelle that made me collector of the port at Copano. Con- sequently I now have, ready for delivery, all the Texan secrets. I counted the volunteers who landed at Copano. I know the Texan strength, and feeble enough it is, but why, senor ? Why are they now helpless, defenceless? Their supply ships have been captured, but why ? Also there's the why of the Matamoras fever, and it's-ah inoculation. Also the discord among the Texan chiefs, fondly nurtured to fruition by Your Excellency's very obedient servant. Now then, dear and dread Napoleon of the West, foot up your military genius at its true worth, as," said Gritton dryly, "I do. Add to that the incidental item of your best armies behind you. Then place the grand total against an Englishman's wits, and tell me which has placed you to-night in the strongest town of Texas. Yes, yes, let us speak to the bargain, Senor Presidente, for I feel myself in the mood to require the pay of one of those armies." 274 THE LONE STAR The cynical villainy of this man Gritton ! The fiendishly subtle game he had played, this fox arrayed as the dense, lumbering elephant ! Even his master, himself a virtuoso in cunning, gazed at him in the wonderment that sur- passing art compels. As for myself, I stared agape. I shuddered to recall how Gritton had warned me against the very machinations in which he had then marked me down for a tool. And now here he was, the prisoner of a man equally unscrupulous, yet he was as lazily auda- cious as ever, and even a little more patronising. But he was much too shrewd not to keep the whip hand. "You forget, senor," haughtily replied Santa Ana, "that I have grown accustomed to taking strong towns without a battle. To appear, to demand their surrender, that is enough. And as for your pay, amigo, it yet remains to determine whether that shall be in gold, or in lead. To begin, will you explain why you were coming here when my soldiers took you in charge?" "Which," said Gritton, "was annoying, very. Now I wonder why they ah, took me in charge? " "Answer my question! Why were you coming here? Was it to protect the senorita you mention? She is here then, she " "Wait," said Gritton. "I met her father out scout- ing yesterday, and I told him that she had gone to Goliad." "But has she, though? Why tell him that?" "Because I did not wish him to come here, and be captured by Your Excellency." "Ai, Dios, and you dare say so, you who know how I have tried to catch this old teller of bad tales! I first sent you, Gritton, to take him, but I think now that you saved him." "Precisely, but when I undertook that mission for you, I did not know that a- ah an overwhelming girl BLISS DEFERRED 275 was involved. I am," Gritton went on, yawning wearily, "prepared to deliver Texas into Your Excel- lency's hands, but," and here a note of scorn tinged his drawl, and put his cold-blooded villainy on an impersonal height almost akin to nobility, "but there was no girl stated in the bond, and I hope that Your Excellency will not imply that there could be. I should not like to ah resent the insinuation. It would be so fatiguing, and it would lose you Texas." "Lose me Texas?" cried Santa Ana. "And I the head of a nation of eight millions, and they without a thousand men in the field ? Ai, ai, preserve me, the saints, from an Englishman's humour! And this other prize that you count greater than Texas, this senorita, friend Gritton? Bien, I shall not need you there. More, I will pay you back your jest, for I even suggest that we be competitors in that quarter. But but you do not appear to rise to the honour, Sefior Gritton." I moved nearer, with fists clenched. But I stepped on a woman's toe, who snarled at me, and the others in the crowded ante-sola grumbled impatiently. They did not wish to lose a word of the shameless argument. Yet if these two men, one all powerful, the other oblivious of power, could know that a helpless fugitive was even then presuming to count himself a third competitor. . . . At least I resolved that, until I fell in the defence of Texas, I would strive to save Nan from both one and the other. "Ai, Gritton," said the President, throwing himself back on the couch, and growing amiable over a discourse so much to his crapulent taste. He was aware, too, of the avid, fawning listeners at either door. " Ai, Gritton," said he, "if you could have seen the mother! Dios, then you would not wonder at my interest in the 37 6 THE LONE STAR daughter, whom I have never seen. But the little stfwora, man! She was exquisite. And fiery? Ai, mag- nified! But it was all bliss deferred, deferred by now for twenty years. You have heard, perhaps, of the Battle on the Medina?" "The occasion, wasn't it," Gritton inquired sleepily, "when Your Excellency ran into some of the fleeing Americans, and implored " "You lie!" cried the Napoleon of the West. "You lie, and for that " "Ah?" said Gritton, faintly sceptical. "But I merely wished to decide for myself from the ah quality of Your Excellency's denial, and I have." "You lie, I say ! Or they were lies you heard. Instead, I captured those fleeing Americans; I, single-handed. But wait. My people here shall have the proof Hold, you, call the fellow Yandell." Promptly the dragoons hurried in the slouching fellow Yandell. "You were waiting to see me?" questioned the President. " Was it about the Indians I sent you to ? " "Si, senor," Yandell replied, "but they wouldn't tomahawk even a settler baby yet." ' ' Why not, hombref Why not ? " "Reason enough, senor. Sam Houston has been talking to them." The President General scowled at the name. "No matter," he said hastily, "we will try them again. Now then, tell us. You were at the Battle on the Medina? " "Of course, senor. That was when Your Excellency was decorated before the Spanish army." "Never mind the Spanish army. But why the decoration?" "You headed off the Americans. You captured eight or ten of them." BLISS DEFERRED 277 "Twenty, Yandell, twenty. You must take care, amigo, to remember a little better. Now, in whac other way was I rewarded?" "Your Excellency was promoted." "Yes, yes, but in a private way?" Yandell squinted his one eye painfully in his anxiety for a good memory. "If," he ventured doubtfully, "if Your Excellency means about one of the prisoners, about Old Man Buckalew?" " Precisely I do. And what then?" "They turned him over to Your Excellency." "Now that is good, Yandell, very good. You see, my friends," the great man went on to explain, "you see, it was not unusual among the Spaniards, this little custom of giving a condemned man to a favourite for exploitation. And why not? There's often a handsome perquisite in a pardon. Altogether we had taken about seventy Americans on the Medina, and we were seating them by tens on a log across a big grave, and shooting them. The first batch had already tumbled in, and we were lining up the second ten, when this particular prisoner of mine, this Book-Bookalew, whispered the word 'ransom' in my ear. I did not know then that his senora was here in San Antonio in an interesting con- dition. Still, it was natural enough, without any such reason as a helpless senora, for a man to balk at taking his place on that log." The President-General laughed at his own subtle humour, and Yandell's guffaw arose, and all the others except Gritton laughed too, though a little tentatively. Gritton peered woodenly from one to another. "That whispered word, 'ransom,'" continued the amiable President, "is a seductive one, and I listened. The man said he had a pot of doubloons hidden away 2 ;3 THE LONE STAR in an old dry well on his rancho in the Red Lands, and if But that was enough. I obtained his pardon from the Spanish general as my own little perquisite. Book- alew next stipulated that I must send him and his lady safely to his rancho, and then he would send back the treasure by my messenger. I had to trust him, and yet he kept his word. Do you remember, friend Yandell?" Friend Yandell made a wry grimace. Yes, he remembered, because he had been the messenger. "But Yandell," Santa Ana queried pleasantly, "you seem to have a bad taste from that adventure, even yet ? " The hairy fellow's grimace blackened to a scowl. "I only spoke to the senora," he began, "and " "I see, and hence the bad taste. Was it a cowhiding, perhaps? At any rate, you are not fond of this Senor Bookalew, eh?" "Senor, if once I could " "Could find him at Goliad, for example? And you shall, Yandell, you shall. You are to start there at once. You will fall in somewhere with my brigade already marching against the place, and afrer the battle you will hunt out our friend Bookalew. If he is still alive and a prisoner But you understand. Now go!" Yandell, fawning malignant gratitude, slouched from the room. "But the little senoral" urged one of the two girls In red and yellow. Both girls were reassured, and were again lolling on the couch beside the Great Man. They catered artfully to his vanity. "We want to know about the little senora," pouted the second nymph. The throng in the doorway saw that the cue was a good one, and they also besought him plaintively. BLISS DEFERRED 279 The illustrious Sybarite retniniscently touched his tongue to his lips. "Well, well," he agreed. " But you must first picture to yourselves that I have brought my prisoner, Bookalew, from the battlefield on the Medina, here to San Antonio. The victorious Spaniards were dragging the townspeople to the jails, and at every turn in the crooked streets we had to avoid a fusillade. Officers and men were carrying off prizes prizes feminine, and I half suspect" here the President glanced around for appreciation "I half suspect that this put me in the same mood myself. Judge then, amigos, of my emotions when I followed the anxious husband to his house and straight to the room of his senora, and there beheld her, exquisite, magnifico ai! She was asleep, and her head on the pillow was bowered round by dark tresses, and her neck, where the sun had not touched it, was of the purity and whiteness of marble. Who, amigos, might withhold a cry of pleasure? And then she opened her eyes, eyes big and lustrous, and with that misty beauty of a woman just coming out of sleep. The man, Bookalew, turned on me, only just realising that I had penetrated to the sanctuary of his goddess. But I stooped under his fists, passed him, and reached her pillow. I was determined that well, that here should be my prisoner's ransom. And her lips ai, they were red, and ripe for picking. My face was immediately so close over her own that she must have thought at first, in her sleepy state, that I was that husband of hers, and she pursed her lips. But I have said it was bliss deferred. Instantly she knew, and a beautiful tigress rage darted like shafts of fire in her widening black eyes, and her nails, the nails of her ivory finger tips, were brought down my two cheeks. That delicious rage, that beautiful face, I shall never forget!" He glanced around for sympathy, but another 2 8o THE LONE STAR thing, terror, awaited him. "Look, look," he babbled hoarsely, "look, I see her now!" He staggered to his feet, gazing fixedly at the patio door. For a moment only a face had peered into the room, and had flitted away again. It was a face hooded in a black lace mantilla, a face of wide-searching black eyes, of tanned cheeks with roses in them. But despite the President's superstitious fright, there was yet the note of quickening greed in his cry, of greed on the scent for twenty years. " Ha, bring her in, catch her!" he panted. And when they brought her, he perceived that she was really of flesh and blood. "Ai, 'tis one I have not seen yet," he exclaimed. "To think there's such a jewel to dazzle a backwoods fandango! But permit me, reina mia, here's a touch of wine to bring back the red in those lips. Those lips a*, there's a better way ! " The girl leaped back as from a snake, a look of ab- horrence prenatal abhorrence, I firmly believe in her eyes. Her two hands, with fingers crooked, darted out from under her mantilla. "Ugh!" she breathed, and her nails tore through the flesh of his cheeks. The President of Mexico, his yellow face streaming blood, glared dazedly at the trembling girl. "The saints," he cried, "tis the little senora/" And again he sprang for her. Bliss deferred! Two men caught him by the arms. One of the men was Gritton. The other was myself. Ah, how I shall forever thank our good Lord that for once I did not stop to think, but that I was there, there between this yellow toad and sweet Nan Buckalew, that I was there and knew it not until he turned on me and I saw the murderous gleam in his eyes! Gritton was equally astounded at my appearance, I think, and BLISS DEFERRED 281 almost as little pleased as Santa Ana himself. After all, we were even in the race, Gritton and I, as to coming to Nan in San Antonio. But why in the world had Nan braved a place like this fandango ? She was look- ing for someone, that was certain. She had seen Grit- ton brought past her door a prisoner, and then in here. And she had come impulsively into this peril to No, the idea was too repellent. Nan could never think that much of the Englishman. No girl could, and Nan No, no, I would not believe it. The room filled at once. It was not a usual thing for the President General-in-Chief of Mexico to be assaulted in the midst of his armies. The rabble buzzed, squirmed, muttered indignation. Gritton and I were instantly overpowered. If we were not also struck down, that was only because the President General himself bit the snarling command half-way between his teeth. "So," he laughed, rubbing his hands unctuously, "we are three, eh? Three competitors; eh, Senor Reeply?" He dabbed a handkerchief to the long livid streaks down his face, and his round eyes dulled to cold expres- sionless greed. He cleared the room of all except our- selves and the four dragoons holding Gritton and me. He wished that we should see, Gritton and I, and he again moved toward Nan, wetting his lips. He was wary now of her nails, but his experience of Nan should have taught him more. As she saw him coming, she shrank back, and one hand pressed her bosom. The prenatal loathing drew her features stark and rigid and waxy white, and this was still her expression as her hand flashed from the folds of her dress, and levelled on him the little pistol she always carried. She did not speak. I don't believe that she could. And she did not move, except for a nervous twitching of her ringer on the 2 8a THE LONE STAR trigger. Santa Ana halted, and the cringing cur showed in his eyes. It was Gritton who released the spring of tension, for he half laughed. "Ah," he drawled, "I wonder what Your Excellency is going to do now?" ' The question was a hard one. Even I, despite the tension, was filled with glee. Deathly fear and baffled rage swept by turns across the President's face. He could order her shot down, and thus rendered harmless. But he looked at her, and he could not bring himself to the sacrifice. He would try for the prize another time. "Bien, bien," he said, and this elastic genius rubbed his hands and bowed himself from her as before a queen. "Dios, she is more than magnificent! She is superb, superb! So much so," he added, his voice suddenly become harsh and deadly, "so much so that I cannot endure the thought of competitors." The toad had found a way to vent its poisonous chagrin. He gave a sharp command to the dragoons who held me, and nodded toward the door. They gripped my arms and were bearing me out, when Nan, saying never a word, and her face more drawn and stark, advanced a step and pressed the muzzle of her pistol squarely against His Excellency's temple. Amazed as I was, I yet noted a quiver of scorn that curled her lips. She had pierced once already to the craven beneath the conqueror's vainglorious shell, and now she was sure of her ground. The President gasped out an order to loose me, and at once I was free. Only then, but with the pistol ever ready, did Nan step back. And then, in the reaction, her lips began to tremble, and after a little she spoke. "I came," she said, "when I saw them bring Mr. Gritton here." BLISS DEFERRED 283 And so that was her reason, after all I But she con- tinued: "I thought Mr. Gritton was the only one in this place who might recognise him Harry, I mean. Harry had taken refuge here just a little before and I didn't know but that Mr. Gritton would betray him, and so I came to to give him warning and and save him. I didn't know just how I could, but but some way. Still, I don't see any way, even yet. But you, senor," and she turned on Santa Ana, "you, the colonel here, or general, or whatever you are, you shall tell me. How? Tell me quickly, how?" My own ineffable rapture in this confession need not be described, and Gritton 's feelings cannot be, because I am not informed. I only know that his hand jerked on his moustache, and that his sleepy eyes opened wider than ever before as he looked oddly at Nan and then at me. As for Santa Ana, he was again the pliant genius. The man was hindered by no more rigidity, either of scruple or shame, than a rubber band, but a rigid rubber band, you know, could hardly be effective. He put his hand over his heart. "With pleasure I will, senor ita," he said, and bowed with winning courtesy. You would have thought that she had asked him for her fan. "It seems, eh Gritton," he went on, more and more suavely, "that one must not name the triumphant competitor before the lady herself has spoken. Now then, Senor Reeply, you are to be saved. That is decreed already. I but echo our queen's command. But you yourself must choose where you wish to go, and my men shall escort you there. Word of a Mexican caballero, they shall." His word of honour had little weight with me, yet I believed that he would grant my request, since it 2 g 4 THE LONE STAR virtually meant the same as death. But the word came hard. "Where, senor?" he repeated. "Where shall they take you?" "To the Alamo," I said. He bowed and smiled, as though he were offering me a cigarette. Nan, I know, started to protest against my choice. But she stifled the words. She would not have me fail in this. "I await, senorita" said the President, "your further commands." "I was about to ask Mr. Gritton," Nan replied, "to escort me back to the house of friends where I am now living." "Granted, senorita" "But if we are followed " "My word of a gentleman, you will not be followed." Whether or not, either she or Gritton might be trusted to outwit his shadowing spies. "We shall need a pass through the lines for three," she said. I guessed by that that she meant to leave the town, and that the third she had in mind was the wife of Deaf Smith. His Excellency wrote out the pass. "What more?" he asked. Nan did not hear. She had all she wanted. But her eyes were ever alert, and the pistol ready. Draping the mantilla about her head, she turned to me and held out her hand. "You have told me good-bye once already to-night, Harry," she murmured swiftly. "Imagine then that that I have returned it." The glorious girl, she must mean, she did mean my kiss! Of course, for as she passed out with Gritton, she looked back, and I saw that the lashes of her tender eyes were wet with tears. CHAPTER XXIX JOLLY COLONEL MALAPROP FOR that night they took me to the barracks in the Plaza, which we had won so hardily only three months before. Despite the harrowing hours just passed, I slept on the cold stones as one dead, until the deep boom of a cannon roused me back to life. An awed whisper came through the dark. "El Alamo!" To be sure, it was the sun-up gun at the Alamo. The awakening garrison around me talked of that other garrison, cooped up in the old mission across the river, of Bowie, of Travis, of the Americanos, as of supernatural fighters. The Mexican soldiers might have been children in an ecstasy of dread, murmuring tales of ogres and bugaboo prowess. The sun-up gun was immediately the signal for that day's hellishness, and batteries roared, and musket volleys filled the lapses between the thunderous blasts. Into this unholy din I was marched, through the nar- row streets, and out beyond the town. More or less we went by the way that Milam had led us in, and I gazed at the scarred walls where we had fought inch by inch. But my guard of some fifteen lancers suspected reflec- tions unfavourable to their race, and gruffly bade me to have the goodness to walk a little faster. I was, by the way, the only one on foot. When we had gained the open prairie, instead of making a detour toward the Alamo, the lancers swerved southward. "Where's your flag of truce?" I asked. 285 2 86 THE LONE STAR "None is needed, sertor," replied the subteniente in command. "But how will you deliver me to my friends in the Aamo?" "Our orders, seftor, have no reference to the Alamo. We go to join the brigade that attacks Goliad, and you, senor, you go with us to identify a proscribed rebel. His name is Buckalew." I halted in my tracks, whereupon a scabrous guard leaned over his saddle, and brought his lance across my shoulders. My hands, I should mention, were tied behind me, and I obeyed the injunction, reflecting however on the dreary march afoot for a hundred miles or more. Hour after hour, until the sun behind the leaden clouds was almost overhead, I trudged through the shifting slush of alkali dust. The chill barb of the north wind lashed my back, my particular friend among the lancers having taken my cloak. An icy mist trickled steadily by drops off my old slouch hat and down my neck, and I was wet to the skin. I had had nothing to eat, and I was hungry and thirsty and faint. We passed a long bedraggled column. They were seasoned veterans of Mexico's perennial civil wars; and with them were their carts, their pack-mules, and their soldaderas, the women camp-followers; all pushing on to San Antonio. They jeered to find an American taken prisoner. A foot soldier darted from the ranks and prodded me with his bayonet, while the others laughed like monkeys, though there was one of the women who murmured "Pobrecito!" Then an Indito cavalryman from Yucatan tripped me with his sword. " We'll soon have the rest of you," they cried. "Si, si, and we hear there's not two hundred in the Alamo. Valgame Dios, that's the question of a day!" And so the column passed us. JOLLY COLONEL MALAPROP 287 My first high anger dulled to callous resignation. In a benumbed way, I marvelled at the change coming over me. It was apathy, but the apathy of sullen hatred. Whitest linen on the edge of a gutter will sop up the ooze until it is a rag. A foul poison was seeping through the warp and woof of my being, just like that, and my soul was like the rag. As to the possibility of antidote, of cleansing, I despaired entirely. Each time the lance of the scabrous guard fell across my shoulders, which was often, the dull craving for murder grew heavier yet. Who the victim might be no longer mat- tered. To kill, to kill, as the crazed starving man thinks on no particular flesh, only to kill, to gorge, that was all in all. Yet as I trudged on and on so wearily, I might have been the driven slave, and dead to all emotion. I was a sodden thing, but venom had made me so. And now I shall tell of the antidote; for there was one, after all. The antidote was a pair of rollicking Irish eyes; also a weather-worn face beaming with fun, and beaming, too, because of the gentlest and the stoutest of hearts within. The antidote began with a rifle shot, a rifle shot when no one but ourselves could be seen over all the bleak expanse of prairie. The shot was of itself clean cut and cleansing, for the subteniente lurched a dead weight from his horse. The others staggered to a halt, and gazed around on every side. But there was not even a scrub oak within range to cover an ambush. There was nothing but the dirty yellowish mesquite grass, nothing except a gauzy trace of smoke drifting lazily away. The lancers fired wildly; and then, being unloaded, began to realise that they numbered only fifteen, and that there must be an Indian or an American prowling on their trail. They were in half a mind to run already, and when a second bullet from quite a 2 88 THE LONE STAR different quarter neatly cleansed another saddle, they waited no longer. Curiosity as to who might be next held too much of tragedy, and off they scattered pell-mell. My own particular and scabrous friend lunged at me for remembrance as he swung his horse about, but the terrified animal jumped and doubled like a jackknife at the sudden thrust, and tumbled his rider into the grass. Then the dull hatred that was in me leaped to flame. My arms were bound, but I sprang and came down upon the lancer's head with both my heels. I struck him glancmgly, and lost my balance and fell. I worked myself to my knees, to my feet, but he was up almost as quick, and at me he came, cursing madly, and flourishing that eternal lance of his. It was hard running without the use of hands or arms, and I shudder yet with wondering why I did not stumble headlong in that boggy road. The lancer and his lance were gain- ing, and I thought of the marksman, or marksmen, in the grass, and thought that now would be a good time for another shot. Yet if the third shot took me instead of the lancer But there, had I known who was in the grass, I'd have had more confidence. As I ran, with the lancer's hard breathing almost in my ears, I thought I saw a wiggling in the grass near the roadside. Then a head arose, of a white man in fox-skin cap with bushy tail hanging behind. He crouched to spring as I passed him. An instant later I heard a heavily falling body behind me, and there was my Mexican, and the stranger atop of him. I noted first the contrast of fox-skin cap with a dandy- ish rubber hunting coat, and I inferred with a pang that the stranger must be some tender adventurer out of the East. And yet his gesture looked especially com- petent. The gesture was not one that you buy with JOLLY COLONEL MALAPROP 289 rubber coats, but of a man who has used steel close in against many a bear. There were the gnarled fingers, the muscled grip on the upraised knife, and as I say, it was all perfectly competent. The stranger looked up as I hastened to him, and then I saw the rollicking Irish eyes. "Don't," I cried. "Don't!" The antidote had acted, you observe. "Not even scotch him a leetle?" queried the man; not, though, in the brogue of Ireland, yet in a backwoods dialect as rich and deep. "Now, my ears fur for a heel tap, I warn't reckonin' that you would so specify." His voice, lusty as of forest depths, wound up roundly on the pompous intonation of an oratorical period. It was very quaint, this grave halting for the imposing phrase and precise enunciation. Swirling in the natural, wild, and laughing torrent of words, it contrasted as oddly as the India-rubber coat with the man's heavily fringed buckskin. In speech, in dress, in manner, here was a whimsical Colonel Malaprop indeed. "More'nover," he added, "it air sartin a notch bey ant my measure to jus' slap-dash right in and work the nullification of a helpless critter, though this un did mos' raise my ol' dander. But he a'n't ain't no b'ar, nuther, even if he do be a varmint, so " So, with the merry quips still tumbling from his tongue's end, my Colonel Malaprop rose from the Mexi- can's chest, and ordered him to his feet. "But I want my cloak," I said. "Your cloak?" Colonel Malaprop snatched it free. "Yes, an' this jab-pole too, fur a soov'nur," and the lance was thrown at my feet. "Thar now," said my efficient rescuer to the Mexican, "thar now, you ricketty steamboat, bust yo' bilers away frum here git!" 2 9 o THE LONE STAR The Mexican's jaw hung loose. He could not under- stand, for in his own code mercy was military heresy. He required a direful sweep of Colonel Malaprop's knife to frighten him to his heels. "Now then, seeny or, "laughed the stranger, when the ricketty steamboat was fairly under way across the prairie, "and what may yo' object be in travellin' roun' with yo' hands tied in any sich fashion? Thar," and he cut my bonds and threw my cloak about me, "let's build up a leetlefire in'erds." With which he sheathed his knife, and drew a flask of whiskey from a coonskin bag hanging over his shoulder. I drank eagerly, but stared the while at this lone man who had arisen out of the mesquite grass where all the world was desert, and had scattered fifteen armed troopers like so many rabbits. Yes, he was alone, but by squirm- ing along the ground while reloading, he had seemed to people the grass with a host of riflemen. He looked the shiftless, jovial vagabond, and lovable he certainly was, for I loved him at once. Guileless easy nature and shrewd humour wreathed his angular features in bub- bling mirth, and yet behind it all one sensed a customer that might be exceedingly dangerous to handle. His glossy black hair waved to his collar, almost hiding his ears, and except for sideburns and a recent growth of stubble, he was clean shaven. He must have been fifty, yet he stood as straight as a young Indian, with all the Indian's free bearing in the wilderness. A some- thing unfamiliar told me he could not be of the plains, and yet the distinction was intangible. But his way of walking was one token. He had the tread of a cat, which betrayed by no snapping twig; a tread that was caution, that was every nerve alert against each thicket and bush of an impenetrable forest. Yes, his was the manner of woodcraft. He had nothing JOLLY COLONEL MALAPROP 291 of the bold stride, or bowlegged stride, of horsemen and plainsmen like ourselves. I gazed slyly at his face, a spare, toughened face beaming with the care-free heart of youth. There was an almost sweet winsomeness there, and soft clear eyes under rumpled brows, a quizzical mouth, a long sharp nose, and sharply moulded chin, all of which would be striking anywhere. But apart from all this I had seen the face before. He noted my perplexity, and the slightly bored pleasure, not without a quaint touch of vanity in having people gape at him, quickened the laughter in his eyes. "Eh now, seenyor," he demanded with charming self- assurance, "and don't you know who I be?" "Yes, yes." I exclaimed, the old hero worship tingling in my voice, "You made a trip East " "Whar where they reckoned I was 'most as great a sight as a Punch and Judy show. But they're prime folks, them Yankees, even if the men thar do milk the cows, and they kin decipher out a gentleman without a spyglass." "And I saw you on the Mall, and we got you up to Harvard for a speech." "And right good boys they war too. Cheered me like I was another Laffyit come a-visitin'. But," he added regretfully, "I 'spose you went and got some initials hammered onto yo' name, wrong end hindmos', eh? I mean," he explained, "a degree of tomfoolery, or something." "Well," I said, "I believe now I did, but I'd almost forgotten." He looked relieved. "Yes, no doubt, no doubt, I jedge that initials and sich do sluff off down here. Thar's nothin' in univarsal natur' so well calculated as the open new country to make every skin hang by its own tail. 292 THE LONE STAR But now," he went on, glad for a chance to talk, yet with a weather eye ever on the bleak flats, "now you take Emp'ror Andy Jackson, who's the Government and Univarse rolled into one, and still noways satisfied, he has to be an LL.D. Doctor Jackson? Now I wisht I may be shot if he ever got to 'jurisprudence' in his speller any more'n me. And what with his stampedin' the pore fugitive deposits frum bank to bank Thar, thar, I come to Texas to keep my temper, so jus' let's take anuther ideer out o' Black Betty I'm as dry as a powderhorn inside and then we'll go and find t'other Betsy, who's my own darlin'. She's restin' up roun' in the grass som'eres." He chuckled gustily at my bewilderment. But I understood when he nosed around off the trail and picked up his rifle. The piece was quite a long one, of exquisite finish and workmanship. "Fabricated fur for me special," he said, caressing it fondly, "and they give her to me in Phil'delphy fur bein' honest. See this inscription?" The name engraven there was "Colonel David Crock- ett." What a happy faculty did our Texas have for drawing big men, and making them bigger! And here in the flesh was the hunter hero, the bear killer, the Redskin slayer, of my childhood dreams! Here was the illiterate Tennessee backwoodsman who lived forty miles from the first settlement, yet ran for the legisla- ture, and was elected. Who could refuse to vote for a man so merry and so downright sincere ? At least the backwoods could not. And more, they sent "the gentleman from the cane" to Congress, where he was hailed gleefully from Capitol Hill to the White House, and again later when he toured the North and became "a univarsal pet." "Si seenyor," he said He appeared to think it JOLLY COLONEL MALAPROP 293 necessary, being in Texas, to let Spanish words sift into his vocabulary, so as to give one a neighbourly footing "Si seenyor, Davy Crockett frum the backwoods, half- hawse, half-alligator, and steamboat, with a dash o' snappin' turtle, who kin wade the Miz'ippi, leap the Ohio, ride a streak o' lightnin,' and slide down a honey locust without scratchin' his laigs. Want to see him lick his weight in wildcats? Or swaller raw any penny- whistle pol'tician o' the Jackson school? Leastwise," he added with a gorgeous wink, "them Yankees took me fur jus' sich a curiosity. But they give me Betsy, same as this coat, and knife, and tomahawk, and this here watch seal. Look at them two hawses on the seal, streakin' it like all wrath, and then the words, 'Go ahead! ' That's my motty. But," he said, half humorously, and a little remorsefully too, "I've done disapp'inted my country, 'cause I've give up all notion o' runnin' fur President agin the Non-Committal Little Flying Dutch- man. Si seenyor, it air true," as if I were amazed and sceptical, "ever sence I champeened the deposits and they rascalled me out o' my election. Then I jus' up and told my constitchents they could go to hell, and I'd come to Texas, till honest men got on top the heap ag'in. So here I be, jus' Colonel Crockett o' Tenn'see, and ready to give you-all a helpin' hand on the high road to freedom. Always war hankerin' to have a spoon in some sich a mess, anyhow. I reckon now that you ought be one o' the revolutioners, seenyor?" I briefly gave him an inkling of my dreary case, adding that I must get into the Alamo. He shook his head darkly. "Best not to try," he said, "The boys in thar a'n't likely to take oncommon civil to one o' you Councilist folks. As fur them orders you got, jus' give 'em to me." "To you?" 2 9 4 THE LONE STAR He explained that he 'lowed to win his way into the Alamo. He had arrived in San Antonio only a few weeks before, and there being no Mexicans or other "living subject" on which to try his Betsy, he had taken to the flats to amuse himself until the enemy appeared. But "b'ar wa'n't very plenty noways," and he was now returning to the town, though only to hear that Santa Ana had marched in meantime. However, my jolly Colonel Malaprop was all "feverish to take a blizzard at the ol' sarpint himself," by whom he meant the President General. "Then," I said, "we'll try to get in together." He clapped me on the shoulder. "You Texians," he cried, "air shore the rale breed!" We did not, however, get in without fighting for it, and this is the way that happened. Through my com- panion's marvellous woodcraft we kept first of all out of the way of scouts, yet drew ever nearer to the sounds of bombardment. We had to cross the river in one place, and stole by arduous degrees along the Alamo ditch, which twisted out westward behind the walls of the Alamo itself. Often we lay for an hour or longer in clumps of prickly pear while a detachment of infantry crept past us to attack the mission. But we never had to wait long before musketry cracked furiously off ahead, and the Mexicans came pounding back in dumb fright, sinking from wounds as they ran ; at which Colonel Malaprop would slap his thigh noiselessly, throw back his head, and open his mouth wide in the gesture of laughing. Night came on, drizzly and cold and dark, yet we could hope little to evade the pickets in the chaparral every- where around us. We crawled on hands and knees, stopping often while Crockett raised his head to listen; and this in the marshy wet until after midnight. And JOLLY COLONEL MALAPROP 295 then, once, Crockett put his hand on my shoulder and bore me down until I lay flat on my stomach, he doing the same. Directly I heard the snap of a twig, very faint and quite a distance behind. Soon there came the sound again, only nearer, and yet more, as of many stealthy footfalls. Abruptly a musket exploded, a sentinel yelled, and there were both shots and yells that meant the hottest kind of a little battle off to our rear. Crockett leaped up, and went charging through the brush toward the din. I followed, gripping the tomahawk he had loaned me. '"the minions of the despot, strike 'em down! Knock their dam' heads off! There ! There ! There !" The words mingled with the shouts and blows, and I knew the voice. It could be none other than the oratorical voice of chubby Al Martin. "They're our people from Gonzales," I yelled to Crockett. "They've come come to help us in the Alamo." "Then right ahead with all might!" roared Crockett, and sped before me like a deer. The battle, when we reached it, was a snarling, strug- gling pack, barely seen in the dark. I could hear their grunts as they struck with knives and clubbed muskets. There were perhaps thirty Texans hemmed round by a hundred yelping Mexicans, and against this outer wall of flesh Crockett threw himself, swinging his Betsy on skulls, leaping from one spot to another with the agility of a leopard, and all the while bellowing like forty men. I followed suit religiously with the tomahawk, until the Mexicans decided that the whole Alamo was on them. They were, besides, dropping like flies as my Gonzales neighbours battled from within. "Now rush for it! Through 'em! Right through em'!" cried Martin. a 9 6 THE LONE STAR "Right you air," roared Crockett. " Come ahead! " The wall broke. The Mexicans sprawled in the breech, were trampled underfoot. It was like a charge, that rush to the Alamo. We gained the open space south of the mission chapel, yelling good American yells. Yells as good came back to us from the Texans on the roof of the Alamo. We poured over the stockade, over cannon in the stockade, and on into the yard before the chapel. Instantly we were hemmed round again, but to be rapturously hugged. My thirty Gonzales neighbouis and Davy Crockett might have been an invincible army. The garrison, a hundred and fifty men, and God's mercy on us now! several women and a child, clamoured about us like a pitiful little shipwrecked band in the utter joy of rescue at last. "Now if Fannin would come! If our express only reaches Fannin at Goliad! If Fannin would only come soon soon!". This was the prayer on every side. CHAPTER XXX BELEAGUERED THE little shipwrecked band, for I cannot get that description of them out of my head, led us jubi- lantly into the old monastery of the Alamo, which now answered for hospital and barracks. Martin's thirty settlers from the Guadalupe the Gonzales Ranging Com- pany, they called themselves had left wives and families behind, and had come to the besieged from the outside world. For the moment they were the token of hope. Why might not others come too, and deliver the besieged to that outside world which had seemed cut off forever? But the merciless horde around our walls numbered in the thousands, and the joyous greetings of the little shipwrecked band, of the women and a wee tot of a girl among them, cut me to the heart with unutterable pity. In the bare, cheerless long room of the monastery, where we had the light of pine-knots, old friends recog- nised one another, and there were rough slaps on the back and rougher jests, and more than one Black Betty went from lip to lip among the ever-changing groups, and the lustiest of all was their boon companion, the blithe slayer of grim Care, my own jolly Colonel Malaprop. I myself held apart, for I expected no welcome here. "Well, suh?" The voice was Bowie's, but hoarse, and thinned by a cough. The look in his gray eyes was cold and stern. "Well, suh?" "I've brought some orders from General Houston," I replied. 297 298 THE LONE STAR "Those you will give to the colonel commandant, Mr. Travis," he said. But I forgot the chill of his frown in a keener pang, for the lank frame was emaciated, the cheeks were hollow, and about the mouth there were the lines of suffering, or of the will not to suffer. The winter sickness foretold odds that the dauntless lover of odds might never vanquish. "Where is Colonel Travis?" I asked. "One moment. Tell me first, why could not all the members of your honourable Council come with you?" That word "Council" brought a group of men around us, and on their faces the reckless hilarity changed to looks that were not good to see. "It's the more pity," Bowie went on, the cold mockery in his tone grating harshly, "that all the Council cannot be here to see what you see, or rather," he added bitterly, "what you do not see. For instance, do you happen to see the men that Doc Grant took from us? Hardly, suh, as they are dead men now." "Or the blankets he snatched from us sick uns?" croaked a haggard man who lay shivering on a cot. "Or," growled a lean plainsman, "the very hosses we needed to round up beeves with?" "Or hosses for our scouts?" added a third like a pistol shot. "With hosses to ride, we'd 'a' known in time the dirty Mex'kins was comin'." "Now as to that," interrupted a calm voice, "the Council never ordered you boys to dance at fandangoes, and you were dancing at a fandango, you know, and that's how we let the Mexicans get inside cannon range before anybody saw 'em." The speaker himself had picked up his wife and child in the flight from the town to the Alamo. He was Lieutenant Almeron Dickinson, a Gonzales man and one of the original garrison at San Antonio. The child I BELEAGUERED 299 had seen was his, and of all there Dickinson had the most cause for reproaches. "But all the same," muttered he who growled, "I'm hellish regretful we didn't go to San Felipe and mob that Council, just as we came so near doing a few weeks back." "And that," said Bowie to me, "is what you'll likely find in the thoughts of a great many here." "And perhaps in mine too," said I. "But," and I raised my voice, for however sorely my heart bled for them, and however poignant the sense of my own blame, yet censure is a weapon at the breast, and it is human to parry, "but," I cried, "I need none of your thoughts to tell me so. I have come with orders." "Which afo'mentioned same," declared Crockett, "I'd uv brung in fur him, but he jus' grumbled like an ol' hawse with an empty stomick. I'd as well whistled jigs to a milestone, he was that sot." "And a good thing too," Al Martin swore stoutly, "or he wouldn't 'ave been around to help us smite 'em to-night. And then, p'raps, we wouldn't 'ave got in." "Oh let it go, Martin," I protested, suddenly mellowing at the note of kindness. "And let all the other part go too," spoke up someone who had that moment joined the group. He was a slim young fellow under thirty, a young lawyer, to judge from the studious cast of his gentle features, and a Southern gentleman by every token of refinement and courteous deference to others. "Yes, we may even let the Council go," he said, coming among us. "Unless," he added winningly, "there's any man here who thinks he has made no mistakes himself as to saving Texas. And besides, gentlemen, it's not the time." "No, it's not the time," .and the word was echoed. Not that alone, but forgiving hands were held out 300 THE LONE STAR to me. For me, though, their reproaches were easier to bear. "You're right there, Travis," said Bowie heartily, and his hand was among the rest. But Travis? Then the slim young lawyer was Will Travis! I had never seen him before, but I had heard of him everywhere in Texas. He had helped drive out the first Mexican garrisons, which was before my time, and the tales of his splendid courage had made more intense my desire to come to this new country and cast my lot with such men as he. Here in the Alamo, on Bowie's declining, they had all forced Travis to take the command. "Someone spoke just now, sir," he addressed me kindly, " of your bringing a despatch." He took the paper, read Houston's big shaky scrawl, and Bowie did the same. Neither said anything, or thought it necessary to say anything. But the white wo- men of the garrison, Mrs. Dickinson and her sister, were anxiously watching the two chiefs, and for the moment their hopes clung to that paper from the outside world. "What what is it, colonel?" faltered Mrs. Dickinson. "Oh nothing, ma'am, really," said Travis. "General Houston merely wishes us to blow up the fort." "Well, it'ull be blowed up all right," said my friend who growled. "And bring away the cannon," Travis went on. "But man alive, we're usin' 'em!" "You don't understand," said Travis, quizzically looking over the little band. "General Houston orders us to evacuate." "What?" cried Martin. "Back-track before Mexicans?" "We might, just possibly," said Bowie, "if Houston had an army. But we happen to know, gentlemen, that BELEAGUERED 301 we're the only force between here and the Sabine to hold the Mexicans until Houston does get an army." "Which," said Travis, "we'll have to do; at least, for as long as we can." "Now if thirty men can cut their way in," Bowie observed temptingly, "then one hundred and eighty can cut their way out, and " "No back-tracking!" clamoured one hundred and eighty men. "I thought not," said Bowie, the prospect. of terrific odds agleam in his sunken eyes. "So you have our answer, Ripley. When will you start back with it?" "That's not fair," I cried hotly. "Can't you believe that that I want to stay?" I knew I deserved it, and yet I was hurt that these colossal beings assumed that I was not worthy of their company. I had despaired already of ever measuring myself by them. To move among the stars, to be of weight to affect the universe, this was too wild a pre- tension for me now. Yet, knowing my Texans, I dis- dained any lesser sphere. I wanted my car hitched to a star, even though it dragged hopelessly on the ground. Then I could at least always behold the glorious constellation. Bowie looked at me hard. "There, Harry," he said, "I ask your pahdon, suh." "And," cried a rollicking voice, "let's all liquor." " We will, Davy, we will! " shouted everybody. " But we want a toast, Davy. We want a toast." "Then," said Crockett, lifting his flask, and pounding out his words to the boom of cannon outside, "here's to Santy Annie " "No," no!" " as fierce as Napoleon and twice as natural " "Go ahead, Davy. Right ahead." 302 THE LONE STAR "and wishin' that his bones will do in hell fur grid- irons to broil the souls o' cowards on. Now, how's that?" The roar of approval indicated that that was stupen- dously acceptable. "Here, here," said Travis, "let's get back to work. There's those jacals down by the river to burn off yet. We can't let the Mexicans fire at us from behind them another day. No, twenty will be enough. The rest of you fall out." The twenty sallied forth, and many of the others returned to guard duty on the walls. A few had their turn for a snatch at sleep, but the full force of the garrison was constantly roused by alarms during the night. Each time, from the furious spurt of Mexican cannonading, we looked for a general assault. It was, however, merely a devilish system of tactics to wear out the besieged through loss of sleep. The next morning .1 rose definitely with the sun-up gun that boomed from the chapel roof. I kicked my bedding of alfalfa into a corner of some old friar's cell where I and six others had tried to sleep, and went out to the walled-in rectangle of the monastery to souse my face in a bucket of water. Many of the garrison were doing the same, as well as chatting and hurling badinage, though their eyes were as heavy as lead. Poor weary fellows, they had just come down from the walls, where they had been relieved by others no less haggard. These last I could see now on the thick walls of the rectangle, watchful for a shot at any Mexican prowling too near From within the walls were banked with earth, and on top there were sandbags, behind which the marksmen could lie down and aim. The monastery itself was no more than a row of cells built the length of one wall. In the row was also the long room used for a hospital. BELEAGUERED 303 The cells and hospital opened on the rectangle. At one end of the row there was a second-story room called the tower room. The walls of the tower room formed a parapet, and on the roof behind the parapet there was a battery. Once in a long while the Mexicans on the surrounding elevations contrived to throw a shell in among us, but these shells had grown purely incidental. No one in the rectangle appeared to mind further than to give warning and step out of the way. As the rectangle was fully one hundred by two hundred feet, there was plenty of room. In the centre Travis's Negro servant and two Mexican boys were barbecuing a beef, and a Mexican woman, whom we called Dona Candelaria, was patting tortillas. The garrison had had the good fortune to drive in a bunch of some twenty head of cattle as they fled here, and later, when they had given up hope of bread, they had found a quantity of corn stored away. Except for the racket of musketry and booming of cannon fringing this little spot around, I might have entered a busy farmyard at sunrise. The compound within the thick walls was a peaceful oasis in a chaos of roaring, and here Dickinson's little girl was romping merrily with a fuzzy white dog. When the dog leaped to catch at her skirts, she took refuge behind a pair of gaunt yellow leggins, and out of the leggins rose the spare form of jolly Colonel Malaprop. As for the terrifying blasts outside, they had come to mean to the little girl only the customary noises of Nature in the great unknown Universe flanking her playground. "The top of it to you," Crockett greeted me with that heartiness that always helps to start the day right. "Made yo' toilet yit, as the great folks say? I mean," he kindly explained, "if you've parted yo' hair and had a nip of applejack? No? Well, here you be. And 304 THE LONE STAR now, let's buckle to the pone and jerked cow. Got the digestion of a cassowary, myself." We ate standing, he all the while serving as a bulwark for the little girl pursued by the fuzzy little white dog. Here her mother found her, and carried her away in arms that strained fiercely for very tenderness. "What say to a leetle shootin' with the ol' backwoods hunter?" This was Davy Crockett's cordial invitation to that day's work. "The livin' subject air constant and plenty. 'Pears like it be the season fur seenyors, and we mought bag a couple or two." He led the way across the rectangle to a heavy wooden door that opened through the adjoining wall of the Alamo's chapel. But to save many tedious and in- evitably vague words of explanation, we may as well have recourse at once to the ground plan of the hoary old mission. (See opposite page.) Passing through the outer wall of the church, which was fully a yard thick, Colonel Crockett and I entered a dark room that might have been a large cave dug out of the solid stone. Here the monks had buried their dead, and in a niche they had kept a holy light constantly burning. On our left there was an arched opening, and through this we gained another cave-like room, which had been the sacristy, and was now our powder magazine. But the few kegs were being steadily depleted by the Texans hurrying in and out to fill their horns and shot pouches. By another and larger door we entered the ruined old chapel itself. The cheerless place was flooded with light, for the rear wall had partly crumbled from the top, and overhead the arched masonry had given way. Only at the front was there any of the flat roof left; which, however, sufficed as a platform for cannon. Here the facade wall rose high enough for a parapet, and over this parapet waved the Mexican H J PLAZA or MISSION | GHANABY MONASTERY RECTANGLE w ~ end Town 5 GROUND PLAN OF THE ALAMO 3 o6 THE LONE STAR tricolour bearing the figures, " 1824." In defence of the Mexican Constitution the Texan sharpshooters on the platform were holding off Mexican armies. By a ladder we clambered up into the smoke and din of the platform, and we found that the present excite- ment was centred about the desire of the enemy to bridge the river between us and the town. The mesquite jacals on our bank, which their best marksmen had used for breastworks, were now smouldering lumps of ashes, thanks to Travis 's sortie the night before, so that the bridge builders were a fair mark. But the Mexicans had dragged up two long nine-pounders, and were making a tremendous pretence of blowing in the front of the church. The cannon were only light field pieces, though, and after the first involuntary respect for the hideous shriek of their shot, one lost respect altogether. There were equally inefficient batteries at the old mill north of us and back of us on the swell of the prairie, and also mid the scrub oak and cottonwoods on all sides, but as a matter of fact they did about as much damage as the puffs of white smoke from their muzzles. These white puffs formed a chain of filmy evanescent rosettes around us, while in front, as we looked over the walls of the mission's plaza and across the river, we faced the town itself , as ever a jumble of blocks fringed raggedly by rush-thatched huts. In the centre of the town, rising over the flat roofs, was the dome of the cathedral, and over the dome floated the usual blood-red flag. The cut- throat emblem was always there, always before our eyes, an ugly token of an ugly doom already decreed. And to oppose that decree we were one hundred and eighty haggard men short of food and ammunition, having more than three times as many yards of outer wall to defend. Many of us must have turned sick at heart as we gazed over the enclosed acres of the mission, at the BELEAGUERED 307 squared walls that had never an angle for vantage against assault; then at the hundreds of sluggish, distant forms, the Mexicans in their camps around us, and last of all, at the constant irritating menace of that blood- red flag. Yet there were few who allowed themselves to think on these things for long at a time. "Now," said Crockett, the minute his head showed above the roof, "who's fur a shootin' match? Eh, you fust," he said, handing me an extra rifle. "That critter swabbin' out the piece down at the river, try him." It was a good long shot, but I rammed a tight ball and aimed with care. "Capital!" cried Martin as I fired and the Mexican leaped high. Crockett laughed merrily. "You did stump his toe, fur a fact," he laughed. "Look, he's hoppin' like a robin on a stove lid. But you a'n't got Betsy, you know. Now see that varmint a-p'intin' t'other cannon? Jus' see his head, eh? Well." His gun went to his shoulder with a neat precision, his head bent over the stock, and with eyes as keen as a lizard's, and nerves as steady as the political course of Henry Clay, to use his own words, he fired. The Texans, themselves deadly marksmen, buzzed in admiration. The head behind the cannon had vanished as though blotted out, and under the carriage a form had stretched itself. "That sure ought to bring you the cut of the beef in any shooting match," exclaimed Martin. "But," said he, fondly patting the old brass six-pounder that he was loading, "here's our pet, the Last Argument, you know. She started this present confab back on the Guadalupe, and she's been arguing pretty nigh ever since. Your Betsy, Davy? Pshaw, tell me how long it would take your Betsy to talk six pounds wuth? Well, our blessed one does that every time she opens her mouth. Or can 3 o8 THE LONE STAR your Betsy talk the President General Excelentisimo out of his boarding house? Well, see that red lump of a shack just the other side the river among them jacals, with the Mexican snake over it?" he meant the Mexican flag "Well sir, that's the boarding house." Sweating in the cold wind, his coonskin vest thrown off, his collar open on his chubby neck, Al Martin tugged at his pet, sighted, and then, confident and eager as a fat man, he nodded to the man with the torch. At the roar we saw the Excelentisimo' s headquarters vanish in a cloud of dust, and gaudily uniformed officers stag- gering out. When the dust cleared, we saw that there was a hole through the house. "Reckon we got Sant' Ana? " hopefully asked a Texan. Martin grunted. "Just as if," he said, "the slimy old eel would get in range in daylight! No, you can bet on that blindfolded." "Anyways, Cap'n," said Crockett, "you win the hull beef, and that Last Argymint shore has a bad tongue. But Betsy now well, Betsy does her little talkin' a considerable heap faster. She's talked 'em already out o* buildin' that bridge. What next, boys? Thar's not a seenyor left." Only to wait, that came next. To think on what waiting meant, that came next. These lulls were the hideous part. We cursed our besiegers only when they were not fighting us. One man gazed long on the old Goliad road. "God, if Fannin would only come!" he said. "Or Jimmy Bonham," added George Cottle, one of my Gonzales neighbours. "You say Bonham went to Fannin for help. Do you think he'll come back ? " "Jimmy," replied one who knew Bonham, "is just the S'uth Ca'lina gentleman to do that very thing." "But it's time he Wait, ain't that a prowler?" BELEAGUERED "Where? Where?" All were eager for a shot. "Down there, crawling under the bank of the ditch. No, now he's hid in the bushes. Yes, there don't you see? wading in the water, and coming this way." The Texans jerked their rifles at one angle and an- other, trying to draw a bead on the figure of a man whom we saw now and again through the shrubbery and cottonwoods along the Alamo ditch. He stole in and out craftily, like a hunted creature. Often he stopped to listen. Finally he looked up and saw us. Then he waved his hand. "Lord save him, that's no Mexican!" "Not by a No, God A'mighty, it's Bonham! It's Bonham, I tell you!" We shouted the news over into the monastery yard, and across to those on the roof of the tower room, and in no time we were shinning down the ladder, throwing open the big front doors, and scrambling over the stock- ade. Thus we met the returning messenger from Goliad, and brought him in. We honoured him vociferously, but our joy was unbounded too, for his first words, answering the anxious question on every lip, were: "They're coming, boys, they're coming. Yes, yes, and they've started already, Fannin, and three hundred men, and four cannon. They're on the road now." "And you, Jimmy, you " "Oh, I came on ahead to tell you, so's you'll feel more like holding out a few days longer." From that moment there were always eyes strained southeastward on the old Goliad road. We held our- selves ready night and day for the supreme sally when the Goliad men should need a welcome backed by our rifles. The Mexicans had already deployed a brigade on the old road to intercept them. The Mexicans were informed as well as we. CHAPTER XXXI A SPECIES OF ATONEMENT ON BONHAM'S coming, it was hard for me to wait while he told his news over and over again, and held long conferences with Travis and the sick Bowie. Bonham was a recent volunteer, and I had never seen him until now, but I thought it just possible that he might know something of my brother Phil. In this, however, I was partly disappointed. He had stayed only over night at Goliad, but he could tell me that most of the Grays were still with Fannin, along with five more companies of youngsters from Alabama and Georgia. The chances were therefore good that I should see my brother when Fannin arrived. "And Mr. Buckalew," I asked. "You saw him?" "Indeed yes, for the reason that he bombarded me with questions about his daughter. Poor man, he had come to Goliad looking for her, while she must have been here in San Antonio all the time. Then he was set on coming back with me, but I made him see that we could never rescue Miss Nan without Fannin's help, and the last I saw of him, he was tugging at the wheels of a mired cannon, and swearing like mad because nobody else was hurrying fast enough. By the way, didn't you say your name was " "Ripley, sir," "Then you escaped from the Mexicans the other day ? " "Yes, but how " "Gritton told me." "Gritton?" 310 A SPECIES OF ATONEMENT 311 "Why yes, I stumbled across him last night near Seguin's rancho, on my way here. He had concluded that you must be here too, and on the chance that you were, he sent you this note. He seemed pretty anxious for you to get it, though I suppose he would have done what he could anyway to help me through. Seemed to know all about how the pickets were stationed. Yet there's no reason to doubt that he's a loyal Why, man, you've turned as white Not not bad news, eh?" In my anguish I nearly handed him Gritton's note. But I checked the impulsive craving for sympathy. For Gritton hinted not only that Nan was in great peril; he insinuated worse. It was none other than shame, shame for Nan, that the blackhearted liar insinuated. But here is the hideous thing in full: Mr. Edward Gritton begs to advise Mr. Ripley, sir, that the young person in whom he is interested has had the misfortune to discover the identity of possibly a greater personage than him- self who also is not of stone in her presence. The name of the greater personage, who happens to be the supreme ruler of a not inconsiderable nation, was attached to certain passes through the lines issued to the young person in question and the humble servitor of Mr. Ripley, sir, and seeing that potent name, she betrayed evidences of not being unaffected by the glamour in the attentions of the greater personage. Lamentably in consequence, Mr. Gritton is under the pain of confessing that his own efforts in the young person's behalf are in danger of being neutralised by her own wishes. Mr. Gritton, how- ever, cannot doubt but that the fascinating Mr. Ripley, sir, would succeed where Mr. Gritton dares not hope to, and that in the light of the countenance of Mr. Ripley, sir, the splendour of the President General himself would fade to noisome vapour. Should Mr. Ripley, sir, entertain a like respect of his own powers, he will find the young person domiciled at the rancho of Mr. Seguin, ably guarded by the dragoons of the august personage afore- mentioned. Mr. Ripley, sir, may be the more hopeful in this if he cares to flatter himself that the young person's faithlessness is due to the 3 12 THE LONE STAR great personage assuring her that he, Mr. R., sir, has purchased safety at the price of blackening his own name in her regard : t. e., by solemnly agreeing to withdraw as a competitor for her favours. The young person's belief in this infamy naturally makes her the more tractable as regards the suit of the great personage. Hence the need of Mr. R., sir, refuting the same before he dies by himself appearing before the young person. Mr. R., sir, can but die in any case, but in this way he will have saved the young person from an ignominy that shall be nameless. The liar! The cynical, insufferable liar! But why his letter? Why all the trouble to intercept our messenger, whom he knew would be returning from Goliad, in order to write me this? Nan was in danger, I knew that already. Yet Gritton, in his sincere desire to save her, could not hope for me to help him. He had too con- temptuous an opinion of my prowess for that. I almost believed at first that he only meant to torture me during my last hours by the thought that with me must die all knowledge of Nan. The field was clear. He might win her, marry her, carry her away, and her father would never hear of her again. This explanation was much more probable than that he was seeking to make me escape from the Alamo and again cross his path. His impatient frown when Nan intervened for me at the fan- dango was evidence at last that he admitted my exis- tence, and this being so, he could not wish to entice me from the chances of death in the Alamo. But one way or another, there was dark calculation here somewhere, as was ever the case with the lazy, sleepy, and incom- prehensible Englishman. Yet my fears for Nan settled me at last in this theory, that she was really in grave danger, and that, in the weird vagaries of Gritton's soul, he wanted to save her though he lost her himself. This would account for the exquisite sting in every syllable of his note. He was merely laying salve to his own humiliation. A SPECIES OF ATONEMENT 313 My first impulse, wrenching every heartstring to a tangle, was to go to her, to go to her no matter the cost. Then the meaning of the cost slowly grew on me. Had he spoken only of Nan's peril, then I could have shown his letter to Bowie and Travis and Crockett, to all of them, and they would force me to leave them, and go to her. But I could not bring myself to let any eyes see the words that connected Nan with shame. That was out of the question, and I did not once consider it. They might not understand. For them Gritton was still an honourable man. They might even believe what he wrote. They did not know that I had seen him at the fandango unmasked as a spy, simply because here again I should have to bring in Nan's name. Nor could I merely tell them of Nan's danger, for then they would want to see the note, and on my refusal, they would surely decide that I had manufactured the whole story as an excuse to desert them. And Gritton must have known that I could not show his note. Had he then inserted his lies about Nan only to force me to what would look like the basest and most cowardly desertion of the superb heroes around me? It was worthy of the adroit intriguant. It was fiendish enough for him. For the moment, though, there was this reprieve from such a decision if Fannin would only come! And all that night I stood guard on the church roof, looking always to the southeast, and always listening. If Fannin would only come! But of all there, I think that I doubted first. For I alone knew, since I could not nerve myself to dash the hopes of the garrison, that Santa Ana had assigned an army to that other little shipwrecked band at Goliad. I could not hope that Fannin's men would come. And they did not come. They never came, that other shipwrecked band. During two more long days, hopelessness grew into the 3 1 4 THE LONE STAR certainty of despair with us all. Yet growing so slowly, despair took on a familiarity, as though it were the regular thing in life, was routine, habit-bred into us from childhood. But there could be no lasting gloom while our big family was blessed with such a member as jolly Colonel Malaprop. His good humour was simply indomitable, and he made of despair a very cheery thing. Bowie loved fearful odds for strictly bat- tling purposes, but Davy Crockett laughed at them. He did not lack for occasion now. But the odds against Bowie were heavier than those against us. The winter sickness had turned to virulent pneumonia, and that brought him down at last to his cot. He lay in the baptistry of the chapel, which was more like a vault in the thick stone walls. Here he was attended by the Mexican woman, Dona Candelaria, particularly, and by the entire garrison generally, and here our leaders held their councils of war. But the sunshine of the dark, windowless sick chamber was Davy Crockett. He had promised Bowie faithfully to bring all the news. "What's this, Jim Bowie," he was saying the third evening after Bonham's return, "what's this here, sneerin' at yo' grog? Well blast my ol' shoes, a man that'll do that degrades himself below the varmint creation. Now I'm not askin' you to go the heavy wet, Jim. Only a drop, jus' to acquit yo'self o' total ab- stinents, like. Thar, that's the way! We got to knock the trotters frum under that cough, you know." For a moment a smile lighted up Bowie's sunken gray eyes, but the cough came just the same, and he gripped his throat savagely, as he might the throat of an Indian. "Still no no signs of their attacking? " he demanded. "Well, whittlin' it all down to the leetle end o' nothin', I do reckon the ol' sarpint air jus' holdin' off tell the last tarnal big caravans o' monkeys kin rest arter footin' A SPECIES OF ATONEMENT 315 it clean here frum Mexico. But Jim, I'm bad skeered that " "No you aren't, Davy," said Bowie, glancing humor- ously on the others of us around his cot, "nor anybody else." "Yes I am, that they mought be considerable rested by now, or I haven't any knowledge o' the use o' breeches, and " "Look here, gentlemen," Bowie interposed severely, "you've been coming in and out all the afternoon, and you're all bursting with something. Now what is it? Don't you reckon I can hear those drums and fifes off in the distance, all around us? Don't you reckon I can guess they're getting ready for an assault? But are they? Are they? Out with it!" Men looked at one another significantly. Others, laden with cannon balls and powder, stopped at the door on their way to the roof. Had Davy told him yet? they whispered of one another. "Yep, Jim," said Davy cheerily, "you air shore on the right trail o' the critter, and I'll have to come out plump with the hull mess. It's a fact, the town looks as rowdy as Hell's Gate, all b'ilin* like a pot. The seenyors been jus' a-pourin' out, like bees out of a gum, a-crossin ' the river south of us and nawth of us. Thar's a million glitterin' baynets around us now, but out o' range, a-sittin' down on the leetle hills. They air like the rim of a cart wheel, we bein' the hub, and thar's only the spokes lackin'. Only the spokes, you savvy " "Yes, I think I do. The rim will break up to form the spokes, and each spoke will be a column with scaling ladders, and then and then the game of subtraction will begin. We must leave as few of them as possible, gentlemen, as few as possible for the rest of Texas to 316 THE LONE STAR handle." But the exultant gleam died out of the sick man's eyes, and he throttled the cough in his throat, and tossed his head feverishly on his pillow from one cheek to the other. He moaned as the shorn Samson. "Lord, Lord," he cried, "and it's the first time I've ever had a chance against five thousand!" Over in the monastery yard our bugle sent forth a piercing note. We started, thinking that it was for quarters, that the attack had begun. "No, no," shouted Al Martin, his face appearing at the door. "There's a general council called. Travis wants us all here in the church." Over our heads we heard the men coming down the ladder from the roof. The others, on the rectangle walls and in the Alamo plaza, trooped in by the side door through the monks' burial ground. Flaming torches conjured ghostly, drunken shadows to life on the old Walls of the chapel, while overhead the leaden sky was a roof of black night. The incessant alarms had stopped for once, and the unusual silence of the world outside was ominous, like a deadly storm in the gathering. As the Texans came, I noticed by the light of torches the peculiar set of jaw on each haggard face. It was a solemn and unsmiling expression, like that of men at a funeral. In their bearing there was a certain awkward- ness, which also is peculiar to assemblages at a funeral. The restraint came from unfamiliarity with solemn things. They felt that an attitude of mind was ex- pected of them, but outwardly it changed to a kind of gesture, and was therefore awkward. They sensed the solemnity of their gathering here now. They knew the solemnity to be in themselves, but the token, the sable draperies, rendered them self-conscious. They tried involuntarily to make the gesture accord with the token. A SPECIES OF ATONEMENT 317 Travis was among the first to appear. He was very business-like, this young Alabamian. His business was to spend one hundred and eighty men with the utmost efficiency. In the cold arithmetic of sub- traction, by how many how many, O Lord might they lessen the score ? Travis had spent himself as a prodigal already, not only in purse, for all did that, but in physical strength, night and day, throughout the past two weeks. Early in the siege he had despatched a message begging a friend to care for his wife and little boy. There was nothing he could do further in that quarter, and he kept thoughts of them from the surface, even as my old Gonzales neighbours fought down the agony of remem- bering their own families. "I shall ask you," said Travis, "to all step to this end of the church." We obeyed, like young people rehearsing a function of some sort. Eight or ten had left their beds of straw in the monastery. They were still sick from wounds gotten during the assault on San Antonio three months before, from wounds that had been neglected. Bowie could not stand, but he had asked us to carry him in his cot. The entire weary sleep-starved garrison crowded to one end of the church, and waited, still with that sense of awkward restraint on them. Travis stepped out, as he might face a jury. But he made neither argument nor appeal. He looked the Texans over for a moment. They had shifted their weights pretty much on one foot, some twisting their old caps in their hands, and all with the docility of rough grown- up men who find themselves entrapped at a prayer service. But that peculiar set of jaw was not to be mistaken. Travis spoke to them very simply. Though used to speaking, he too betrayed restraint. He stumbled for 3 i8 THE LONE STAR words, not from emotion, but rather in the fear lest a stirring phrase escape him, lest the phrase be tawdry and cheap, a desecration. His diffidence was only the deeper reverence for the unfamiliar thing, solemnity. They knew of course, he said, what the end must be. There was no need to tell them that. They knew too, that it was near. There could be only a few hours, at best, for those who stayed. There was as little chance, also, for any who might choose to attempt escape. But if any did so choose, it was no time for a man to look to another's commands. In this he gave back his authority, the authority they had given him. To give back to each man the supreme decision, for this he had called them together. He would lead, if they still wished, those who remained. But in his heart he would hold no reproach for any man who chose the other thing. "And yet," he added brokenly, "I shall dearly love those who stay." He paused, waiting. But no man spoke. They stood as before, on one foot perhaps, or twisting their ragged caps. "Well then," said Travis, "we might put it to a vote. Here, we'll do it this way." He drew his sword, and traced a line in the dust on the stone floor. The line separated him from the rest of us. " Now, let those who wish to stay cross over the line." Bowie thrust back his chin on his pillow, looking up at those around him, and signalled with his eyes. I was standing near, but drew hastily away. At once, though, four others caught up the litter, and bore it across the line. The sick man's gaze held mine as he went, and I knew within me that Jim Bowie was passing out of my life, and I out of the esteem of a man among men. The others had waited only that he should go first a delicacy not consciously thought out, but instinctive. A SPECIES OF ATONEMENT 319 Now they sauntered across the line, an irregular, shuffling mass, as if they were being called to supper. No one took any heed of what the next man was doing, for it was perfectly natural that they should all come to supper when called. It was just that way, until all of them had gone over the line. Then the prayer service, the de- pressing sense of restraint, was at an end, and they began to chat among themselves. One noticed for the first time that I had not crossed over, and he started to call me, thinking of course that I was only a bit slow. But at once it dawned on him that my staying behind was a matter of conscious decision. The others held up their torches, and peered at me all alone there in the dark end of the church. My feet lifted one after the other as by galvanic im- pulse, until I stamped them down to the floor. Only across the line, just a stride, it was so easy, so very easy. But to stand, to stand fast while one counted ten, this was the meaning of the cost. I had come here to see them through to the end. For this I had left San Felipe, had said good-bye to Nan. The devoted band had hushed their reproaches, had tolerated me among them, had granted me the boon of expiation. And now I must go from them a renegade, worse than a filthy leper, for so Gritton had arranged it in his hideous message. I could tell them nothing of reasons, nothing of the foul hints against Nan. I could not do that, even though I knew they would shortly die. So I must leave them to die, reviling me in their hearts, and never to learn in this life that no mere fear of death had made me turn coward. To face danger was anguish for me, and it was anguish that had never grown less, but to turn from danger was now a matter for courage before which I shrank in horror. I could yet cross the line one stride 320 THE LONE STAR "Now then," said Travis, "as we've all decided" He paused expectantly, and in a hushed silence that made the old church seem a tomb, they looked my way, waiting. The split half of a tooth fell on my tongue. My locked jaws had cleft it. " as we've decided," said Travis, "let's get ready, and and, God's mercy on us all!" I had made no mistake as to the filthy leper. The garrison scattered about their duties. They loaded rifles, to the last extra one. They carried ammunition where needed. But not one came near me in passing. Yet it was better that way. Before one word of kind ness, I might not have had the strength to keep silent. And as I stood there, drawn back into a dark corner, alone and shunned, I knew that this too was expiation I had not thought of it in that light before. CHAPTER XXXII ONE SUNDAY MORNING IN CHURCH TO THE farthest corner of the ruined chapel, back against the rear wall, I took myself. All in the fore part of the basilica, whether throwing tip bags of sand against the ponderous oaken doors, or sorting cannon balls on the roof platform above, were my own fellow countrymen, yet I was as much alone as on that dreary night when I had stolen up the river in a skiff, and alone I had the same crushing problem before me, which was to get through the Mexican lines. My former comrades had their own problem to solve, a very dif- ferent problem, since there was no hope in it whatever. Mine looked to escape, while they no longer had sym- pathy with even the chance of escape. Theirs was to spend themselves to the last breath, and make even this last breath of each man of the one hundred and eighty count for yet one dead Mexican the more. And then, when it came to the very last man of the garrison, he was to achieve the supreme expenditure. "When there shall be just one of us left," I heard Travis tell them, "this last one will hurry with a torch to the powder magazine and " "And then go rip-roarous ahead!" cried my Colonel Malaprop. "Cook 'em to a cracklin'!" I think there were those who shuddered. The brave humour died in the old hunter's eyes, and gravity, reverence, sobered his angular features. "You-all know," he said, "that the eye of the Almighty air on us." I heard in poignant longing. These Texans were 321 322 THE LONE STAR arranging to divide a sum of glory that does not come to men in ages, and one "counted heroes where he counted men." Again Davy Crockett was speaking, and again with that awe in his voice, as though he were groping along an unfamiliar trail. "Well, as / rec'lect, mos' men git remembered fur the way they died, and not as they lived. You kin sling out a package o' glory on the counter 'longside an obscure life 6' rec rectitude, and I wisht I may be shot if I wouldn't rather be a nigger's coon dog in the cane-brake than tote home that thar last article by pref'rence. Now then," he added, in the quaint, half-sheepish way he had of twisting out of a solemn discourse, " jus' one more nip o' the ardent." But as to either of those two packages in the emporium of Fate, how cruelly exorbitant is the grim One behind the counter when we come to buy ! More often we falter, and end by asking for something else, a toy, a cap and bells, sacks of gold, a black bottle. But my superb Texans there were rollicking spendthrifts. They had the price to pay, and the storekeeper would give them the chance. I was only the beggar watching them with nose glued to the window, and eyes of greed and envy. Theirs was the chance, mine the chance lost, and I was filled with bitterness against the exasperating fate that denied me my share. Thus did the cool and matter-of- fact arrangements of these men on the heights of sub- limity lift my timid, death-fearing soul there too, and in the fervour of longing to give my body to the points of bayonets, I cursed every fateful circumstance. How I hated Gritton! Gritton and his villainous intrigues! And, God forgive me, I all but hated Nan, for she was the cause. In my dark corner I loaded my rifle, the rifle borrowed from the extra supply of the garrison, and stacked it with the other reserve guns, along with my powder-horn ONE SUNDAY MORNING IN CHURCH 323 and shot-pouch. At least I would not deprive those who knew how to use the implements of glory. Then, back in the dark corner, I waited until I might steal away without being seen, lest they should be softened to a last word of farewell. That, I knew, would be added pain. It was nearer morning than midnight when the old church quieted down at last, and the garrison had settled to the silence of guard duty on the walls. Then I ven- tured the first step in the only plan I could figure out. This was to climb the rear wall, which, as I have said, had fallen partly in ruins at the top. But even so, the wall was still fifteen or eighteen feet high, and I brought the ladder from the front end of the church. The sky had cleared, and only the stars saw me as I climbed toward them. On the top I squirmed round until I lay along the crumbling thickness of wall. I meant to twist myself over the edge on the outside until I hung by the length of my arms, and then to drop to the soft bank of the old ditch that flowed behind the Alamo. To creep along the ditch southward, to pass through the lines, and reach Seguin's, where Nan was, these were future degrees in the problem. But dropping from the wall must come first. I was pushing myself over inch by inch, and my feet were in space, and I was poised at my waist band on the edge, when over in the chaparral behind me there grew a rustling sound not made by the wind. I scrambled instantly back on the wall to take another look abroad. The open space behind the ditch, once the cultivated lands of the old mission, seemed a ghostly expanse under the stars, as silent and lifeless as before. Yet off on the black wooded swell of the prairie, there still came that rustling sound. General Cos, the Per- fect Cuss of the broken parole, we knew to be encamped 3 2 4 THE LONE STAR over there, and yesterday large forces of infantry and cavalry had reinforced his batteries. I looked more sharply, and the vague sound grew, and after a little the wooded hill seemed to spread its dark blot over the ghostly expanse, until one thought the entire chaparral was moving in the night like a sheet of shadow. It was flooding nearer, too; and then, in the moving shadow, I detected faint, hair-like gleams of steel bayonets! I was too late. Our men over on the monastery walls began calling hoarsely to one another, and there were padded footfalls across the rectangle yard, and then a spark as a gunner on the church roof lighted his torch. They too had seen, and this rousing of the garrison was to me like the deep taking of breath for a blow. I should have crossed the line that Travis drew the night before, for now I must go back to them after all. Yet in their eyes I should be a coward no less, since I had tried to escape, and failed. Nevertheless there was balm laid over raw torture in the knowledge that choice was taken from me, and that I was to have my place among them. Almost joyfully I reached with my foot for the top round of the ladder. But my foot groped in space. The ladder was gone. Turning, and looking down, I saw two of our men restoring it against the edge of the roof at the other end of the church. I opened my mouth to call to them, then remembered that I might save them the trouble since I could crawl up the broken rear wall and thus around by either side wall to the battery platform in front. But fatality would have it that I chose the inner side wall, that on the north and next to the rectangle, instead of the outer one, that on the south. Otherwise my name would now be engraved among the heroes. What I mean is simply this: when I had made nearly half the distance along the north wall, and a few yards more would have brought me ONE SUNDAY MORNING IN CHURCH 325 among my comrades on the roof ahead, I discovered what I should have remembered, that the old wall had crumbled away to the depth of ten feet or more, as though a jagged wedge had been blasted out. I could not leap the space, nor climb down and then up. But there was a curved arch of masonry that had once sup- ported the roof, and this bridged the chasm across to the other wall. Instead of going all the way round by the rear wall, I decided to go to the south wall over the arched bridge. It was just here that fatality swung her mace in the dark, and under the blow I went no farther. In other words, as I crept on my knees, and was nearly half-way across, I lurched forward into a slight depression in the masonry, and went flat on my face. Reaching out my hands sideways, I found that here my bridge was hollow like a trough. I had to raise my head to see the dim shadows of our men on the roof platform. And, even if it were broad daylight, and they were Mexicans on the platform seeking out a last victim, they could not see me; that is, unless they approached along the side wall as far as the arch. But if they did that well, they would hack me to pieces in the glee of finding at least one American who was a skulker, who was weak mortal flesh like themselves. The thought was a purely idle one at first. But straightway Nan flashed into my mind. If this should be a chance. . . . And there I had the decision to go through all over again. But decision was more hideous now even than before. The chance was a pitifully slender one; while the other way, I could take my part below, I would make myself count, I would not then die like a rat dragged from his hole. But there was Nan. ... I pushed the decision from me. I am afraid that I did not decide at all. I lay where I was, postponing it. 326 THE LONE STAR There was yet time. And meanwhile I scooped up the mortar dust with my hands, and covered myself, to see well, just to see how snugly I might be hidden. The stars had faded out, and for the moment the night was of the blackest, to glorify by contrast the near dawn of Sunday morning. I sat up in my trough, but I could see nothing of the dark waves that I knew to be flooding down upon us from every surrounding height. Torches in the church under me glowed hazily, and another flamed among our gunners behind the parapet on the church roof. A vague light told of the same watchfulness on the roof of the tower room, but the rect- angle was dark and silent, and the big walled-in plaza of the mission also, and on all sides around the walls the black night thickened. One had to goad imagination to realise that space out there was peopled by a horde of warriors. Only across the river, between us and the town, where a restless lantern light flickered and van- ished, and flickered and vanished again, was there token that the world could be inhabited at all. But Santa Ana must be where that lantern was, booted and spurred, wetting his lips thirstily, and the squirrel's lecherous greed in his cold eyes. The Mexican host was waiting for day, the little ship- wrecked band only for the chance to strike. The night melted gently to dull gray. A bulging outline took form in mid-air, the dome of San Antonio's church, swelling over the flat roofs of the town. Above hung a limp, rag-like thing, and that was the blood-red flag. Blocks of gray, the town itself, emerged from the slug- gish mist. Nearer, along the river's bank, black-capped infantry were massed by regiments, and behind them were helmeted cavalry in a forest of swords, and in the rear a brilliant little group of horsemen on prancing steeds. Gilt and gold caught the light, and became ONE SUNDAY MORNING IN CHURCH 327 dazzling splotches. The breast of one among the horse- men flamed like a sunburst, and this one was His Excel- lency, the President General-in-Chief. On the north, though farther off, and hardly more than a blur of shadow in the ground mist as yet, were other halted phalanxes. To the east, back of us, there they were again, and yet again, to the south. The rim of the cart wheel had shrunk closer in during the night. Now only the spokes were lacking. All this I saw in the first streak of day, and hardly then before the President's trumpeter sounded the charge, and the shadowed masses broke into columns, and came rolling nearer and nearer like a torrential wave. A regimental band across the river burst forth with the piercing "Deguello," the cutthroat inspiration to blood- shed, and with the "Deguello" we heard the first mur- muring of the wave, deepening to a roar as it came. Hoarse cries broke over the volume of sound. " Kill the robbers of our country! " "Kill the rebels! " "Kill the land pirates!" "Kill the foreigners!" The invariable Word was "Kill, kill, kill!" Then a cannon's thunder underlined the sentiment. The cannon was one of our own, stationed in a breach of the plaza wall on the north. The first spoke of the wheel had centred on this weak spot in the hub. The plaza of the mission was a vast area, and its walls had no angles, so that the few Texans there had barely fired a second time before the Mexicans were swarming up under the shelter of the wall and pouring through the breach. I could see the handful of Texans over there fire their rifles point blank, then club and swing them, laying the first black crest of the wave to their ankles, and then, man by man, sink out of sight under the flood. Almost the first to vanish, and also among the foremost to breast the tide, was a slim young fellow as active as a cat. He plied a sword, 328 THE LONE STAR and with it mowed a circle around him, and in this space I saw him through the powder smoke droop little by little until he fell to his knees. Then a Mexican, belted in the green sash of a general, rushed on him with drawn sabre. But the dying Texan caught at the blade, wrenched it free, and ran the Mexican through. Both went down at the same time. The Texan was Will Travis. The plaza was taken, and the assailants pouring in, turned our own cannon against the monastery. But for our people on the tower room and behind sand bags on the monastery roof, they were easy slaughter, and the Texans let forth an unlovely yell as they set to. The captured gun was cleared and scores of Mexicans surged upon it again over their dead. Bodies strewed the ground around more thickly, until they rose to the height of the cannon, and had to be dragged from before the muzzle as yet others of the living struggled to reload. At last the Mexicans in the plaza turned to run, but ran on the swoids of their own cavalry. Mounted officers beat them frantically, and turned them to it again. Other columns were being hurled against the rectangle on the north and rear as well, and being likewise rolled back staggering upon their cavalry, even before they might place their ladders. A seething fury of smoke hid our riflemen on the walls, so that on three sides the rectangle seemed about to burst in flames. Simul- taneously the engulfing wave swept down upon the church itself. With the taking of the plaza, Santa Ana's bugle sounded again and the massed regiments changed to rushing motion. Until fairly under the church doors, they had. the shelter of the long plaza wall. We could hear the swift tread of many feet, and then they were at the stockade. A regiment dashing across the open from the south, though falling as they ran, joined them ONE SUNDAY MORNING IN CHURCH 329 in the same instant. Together they were a small army, confident in their numbers, exultant in their terrific momentum. But the stockade prolonged the plaza wall to the front corner of the church, and this stockade they had to pass through to reach the church doors. And then, the stockade bristled with cannon. Also, the tower battery commanded the stockade yard, and on the church roof there were more cannon, and such marksmen as Davy Crockett and Al Martin. All the cannon, all the rifles, leaped to uproar. The tower was lost in rolling smoke, and the church parapet also, where the Texans under the grimy tricolour were seen in glimpses only, dim, infuriate silhouettes of men, like desperate firemen on a crumbling wall. The stockade and the yard within I could not see at all, though I got excitedly to my feet and stretched my neck, but the smoke was rising thicker and thicker from below, and our cannon down there were thundering, and the screeching horde of Mexicans were firing their old escopetas until the din was just compact hellishness. But after a little there were breaks in the deafening racket, and across the river, faintly heard, the regimental band struck up the diana of triumph, and Santa Ana himself with his pompous staff came galloping over the bridge. Was the stockade taken then? Had the Alamo fallen? The jagged gaps in the frantic clamour below were longer now. It must be so. But midway on the bridge Santa Ana jerked his horse to his haunches. The blatant triumph in the man's bearing went limp in this gesture of fear. He swung his horse, and clattered back across the river. Close behind him, almost running him down, were his own routed cavalry. The cavalry were being driven by the sheer mass of stricken infantry. Once out of range, the President General-in-Chief turned on them, struck 33 o THE LONE STAR the nearest with the flat of his sword, tore off the epau- lettes of a dragoon colonel, cursed them, raged like a madman. His staff laboured likewise. So did the cavalry officers. And so, at last, did the cavalry, and with sabres changed to scourges, they lashed back the stampeded infantry masses, herded them back along the plaza wall like cattle to the slaughter pens. Behind them all, erect on his white stallion, like a monument to martial wrath, the President General-in-Chief waved them angrily to the charge. "And too low mean," roared Crockett, leaping on the parapet and shaking his fist at the cautious Napoleon of the West, " and too low mean to swab hell's kitchen! " Crockett had had a moment's hope of big game, and his slow temper was rising fast. ' ' Look I The monastery ! Look, look ! ' ' cried Martin. There were Mexicans already on the monastery's long flat roof. They were climbing up ladders from the plaza as fast as they were knocked down, and grappling hand to hand with, the Texans, eight or ten or even twenty Mexicans to one Texan. Prodded by officers they leaped over into the rectangle itself, and were knifed as they came. Others charged along the mon- astery roof toward the tower, and the tower batteries were levelling them at point blank range. But the plaza below swarmed with Mexicans, and those not climbing the ladders were firing at the tower. "God A'mighty, boys," yelled Martin, "turn the cannon on 'em! Quick now! Let the stockade go for a minute!" But the stockade guns also were roaring once more. The wave had swept on them down there a second time, and I could picture muskets swinging on skulls across the cedar logs, the scene over again like that when Travis fell. ONE SUNDAY MORNING IN CHURCH 331 The monastery and rectangle had been as hotly pressed from the first, and now were more so. The torrent was breaking over on every side. Ends of ladders rose like spikes against the rectangle's north and rear walls, and heads in high black-glazed caps were constantly bobbing up, yet as constantly almost as constantly vanishing, as though mowed by a scythe. The Texans behind their sacks of earth on the walls were firing as fast as they could reload, but more and more, as the black-capped heads multiplied, they had to club their rifles. The bodies must have been heaped high around the ladders, and once, and yet another time, the assailants staggered back against the cavalry sabres. But they were rounded up, prodded, and beaten to it again, like hounds to the lair of a wounded lion. So again they came pouring up the ladders, and again the tawny faces began to drop back out of sight, some frozen in a horrible grimace, others human faces no longer, but raw flesh and spurting blood. Here and there a Mexican rose as high as his waist, or got even to his knees, before he hurtled back- ward. At last one jumped inside the rectangle, and was instantly brained. Another followed, and lived to gain his feet. A third lasted long enough to close in with the nearest Texan. Four more tumbled headlong after him, and before these could be despatched there were groups of five or six dropping over from twenty different places along the two walls. They were also leaping in from the monastery roof. The defenders abandoned the walls, and threw themselves on the increasing pack in the rectangle. They rushed to a howitzer loaded with grape, and turned it full on the Mexicans there. "To the monastery!" shouted one Texan. I recog- nised the voice of Bonham. Step by step they gave way, littering the ground with 332 THE LONE STAR Mexicans, and guiding their backward course to the door of the monastery's long room. They were a piti- fully meagre handful of neighbours, of men i knew, against a uniformed mass. Figures yellow-clad in deer- skin, or dull-gray in homespun, they were individuals, each one of them. The mass was a destroying force, incidentally dark bluish in colour, yet a sinister power only, as impersonal as an avalanche. Possibly one half the Texans in the rectangle, instead of keeping on to the monastery, made abruptly for the passage through the side wall into the church. I could hear their muffled shouts, down in the monks' burial crypt as they crowded in there. They were pushing the door tight, and heaping bags of sand against it. Out in the rectangle the other Texans were pressed hard on three sides, while the Mexicans on the monastery roof shot them from above. But they reached the door of the long room at last, and slowly backed within many sinking in their tracks as the enemy on the roof fired down upon their heads then by main force pushed the door to against the tide. They had shut themselves from the world, and I thought of a man slipping into his coffin, and drawing the lid after him. Martin's battery and Crockett's riflemen now turned their fire on the Mexicans in the rectangle. But those Texans on the tower no longer had time even to swab their pieces, for the destroying mass was sweeping over them from the monastery roof, and there again it was the episode of clubbed rifles so long as a Texan remained. Down in the long room, however, Bonham and his men had a moment's respite, at least enough to charge their weapons, and the moment after they were firing through Windows and the loopholes of their door. Mexicans driving forward with crowbars doubled on themselves and fell before they could strike. Officers used the flat ONE SUNDAY MORNING IN CHURCH 333 of their swords, forced the living to snatch up the crow- bars again, and again the catapults were checked midway. All the time lead and shell from the church bored down into them, and here and there scooped out a gaping hole in the turbulent surface of heads. But the chasm was flooded instantly, and besides, the Mexicans were still pouring over the rectangle walls, like a bluish stream over a dam. Also they had captured the tower room, had turned the cannon there on the church, as well as cannon of their own in the plaza, so that the church battery was being gradually silenced. After recoiling repeatedly, the Mexicans in the area could now order their charge. Fully twenty of them with axes and crow- bars rushed upon the door. The volley from within curtained the door in smoke, but there were yet a few assailants who reached the mark. The door fell under their blows, and the Texans suddenly exposed inside pistolled them instantly. Other Texans behind shot over the heads of their comrades, and yet others, having reloaded, took their places. The Mexican corpses in the doorway served for a breastwork. The assailants loaded the rectangle howitzer, dragged it before the door, and fired. The discharge tunnelled a passage through the bodies into the room. With bayonets fixed the Mexicans rushed into this passage like a crowd through a gate that is abruptly opened. With them they dragged the howitzer. The fighting continued inside. I could hear the dull fall of many blows, the snarling roar of many voices, and after a little, the smothered report of the howitzer. They had fired it in the room against the Texans, huddled possibly at the farthest corner. A few more cries, a few more pistol shots, a Texan oath, and the muffled roar died away altogether. Through the smoke the Mexicans began coming out, those of them who were left. 334 THE LONE STAR X In my trough on the masonry arch I straightened tensely, face downward. My knuckles were screwed fiercely against my cheeks, my nails fleshed in my hands, and lying there so high with naught human between myself and the bright sun, I commenced to sob, mutely, tearlessly. My soul was thirsting for something I could not understand. In all life, in all death, what could explain this manner in which life and death met? It was not a thing for sanity to dwell upon, and yet, lying there, and forced to see and hear, I ... A terrific explosion jerked up my knees under me. The explosion seemed to come from under the church, though to one side. I raised my head. The Mexicans were howling around the little door in the side wall of the church. Their yells rose in hollow volume from the monks' burial ground. "Ai, kill them! Kill the foreigners! Kill them!" And then the Texan oaths: "Do it then, dam' ye! Oh, you skunks, do it!" The Mexicans had blown open the side door, and that was the explosion I had heard. Everywhere else they had exterminated all life in the Alamo, and now only the church remained. Below me I saw our men darting into the church from the cave-like rooms, snatch up an extra rifle, and hurry back again to the killing. The Mexicans were not getting in that narrow door very easily, even though they had rolled up the howitzer. But they were at the heavy front doors also, bombarding them with the cannon just captured at the stockade, and all the time Crockett and Martin and the other men on the church roof were firing down into them. But those Texans on the platform were themselves staggering under a triple cross fire, from the plaza, from the tower, from the rectangle. Their parapet had gone partly down before cannon balls, and their own heavy shot was exhausted. Martin and ONE SUNDAY MORNING IN CHURCH 335 Cottle were cramming slugs and scrap iron into the muzzle of our old six-pounder, but the rest of the battery was silenced for good. Crockett and the others had only their rifles left. Above the din of blows, the popping of muskets, the vengeful clamour of striving men, and in between the deafening explosions of cannon, there rose to my ears a ridiculous note. It was the indignant bark- ing of a very small dog. I looked down into the church, and there he was, the fuzzy little playmate of Lieutenant Dickinson's little girl. He had run from the battling confusion in the monks' crypt through the sacristy and out into the church. The powder smoke already floating lazily from the cave-like inferno had half-choked him, and he had had great trouble to dodge the feetof ourmenrushingbackand forth. But most, I think, he objected to the noise, the all- pervading noise that would not abate at his shrill defiance. Jove of old was not here to thunder protest, and all alone the valiant little animal simply barked it. Pos- sibly the ridiculous note was not so ridiculous, after all. The dog stopped, and looked back with an anxious yelp. Why were they not following? At once there appeared the little girl herself, in her father's arms, and close behind, her mother and her mother's sister a group of stricken haste, another Lot and his family fleeing from destruction. Dickinson had placed them in the sacristy, but the sacristy was our powder magazine, and filling now with smoke. From the crypt the Mex- icans were pushing to the sacristy inch by inch, and it was no longer a refuge for women and a child. But where next? God in Heaven, where next? Never on a human face have I beheld such agony as when Dickin- son paused, undecided, and looked wildly around him. They had just left the fury of wolves. But ahead the 336 THE LONE STAR bombardment was already splintering the heavy oaken doors. Yet ahead he took them, holding close to the wall, and gained the small vaulted room to the left of the entrance, just opposite the baptistry where Bowie lay. The parting I could not see, but I knew what it must have been from the poor lieutenant's face, as he came out alone. Yet with his first step back to duty, his wife ran out and clung to him. By strength she tried to hold him, and draw him into the vaulted room. But seeing that he must and would leave her, she began hurrying him on his way, yet clinging as ever at his side. The man wavered, not knowing how he might force her back from his own death. He looked down. His little girl was hugging him around one knee. Then he found a way the cruellest and the only way. He caught up the child and placed her in the mother's arms, his own arms for a heart's beat enclosing them both. An instant later he was gone, vanishing in the dark sacristy. The mother stayed with the child. The muffled uproar was rising to sharper clashes, gaining ground from crypt to sacristy. The Texans were falling back into the church, and not always to reload. They were being pushed back. All were faint. After two weeks of incessant alarms, this last day had found them exhausted quite. One gasping man reeled out of the dense smoke, and sat himself down on the floor. With his finger he scraped the perspira- tion from his temples, his neck, and his bared hairy chest. He stayed to breathe a moment longer, after which he bit off a chew of tobacco, caught up his rifle, and went back to work. Others staggered and fell who did not rise again, and these were trampled upon by yet others. Nearly all were bleeding. Often an arm hung limp, but the other arm, whether left or right, was lengthened by a clubbed pistol, a knife, or a ONE SUNDAY MORNING IN CHURCH 337 hatchet, and beating down on heads in front. Inch by inch, almost imperceptibly, the sacristy disgorged them, and after them appeared the first swart faces of the Mexicans, pushing slowly into the body of the church, directly under me, all the while muttering like an incensed mob, and stabbing furiously with bayonets. While there was yet time, one among our men lighted a torch, and thrust it in a crack between the stones of the wall above his head. There the thing blazed peace- fully and harmlessly over the snarling pack, and there it would be ready to the hands of the very last Texan, when the moment should come to blow up the Alamo. Under me the Texans, not forty of them all told, v; "re giving way toward the front of the church, but there they were suddenly taken in the rear too, for the bom- bardment behind the heavy oaken doors swelled to a deafening climax, and the doors themselves crashed backward. The dense mass outside howled like wolves, and in they surged, over bags of earth, and over the dying Texans. The defenders still left backed to the corner of the church, in front of Bowie's door. There they kept on fighting. Eight or ten Mexicans were swept by the crush of their own numbers into the vaulted room opposite, where Dickinson had left his family, and in there Dickinson himself now rushed at the same time. Useless as it was, though senseless to that or aught else, I shrieked a warning down at them. But where hun- dreds were yelling and shrieking, none heard me. Yet I saw, first the body of Dickinson, spitted on bayonets, thrown out of the vaulted room like a truss of hay ; then the two women dragged out by the hair, and the child torn from the arms of her mother; and after that, bayonets lifted. I hid my eyes, but looked again, nevertheless. A staff officer, to judge from his dashing 33 8 THE LONE STAR uniform, had swept the assassins away, even cutting them down, and was thrusting the two women and the child back into the vaulted room. At the door he placed a guard, then sprang to the front of those encircling the handful of Texans against the wall, where he led the wolfish pack. I thought I knew this Mexican, and after a little I saw his face, and recognised him as Colonel Almonte, Santa Ana's aide and favourite. The cornered Texans were fighting him and his army like tigers. Like tigers for I can use no better word to picture the superb ferocity of that little handful. Even the god-nerved Trojans were often dazed by a sense of the hopeless, and in a funk would turn and run. But these other men were Texans, and the Norse and the Teuton in them must have given them a sense, not of despair, but of a Valhalla, the paradise of warriors slain. Again and again the Mexicans shrank from them in awe, as from demons. The Texans were piling up the corpses around them to the height of a bulwark, yet still hammering down the nearest Mexicans into the heap. They hammered with their clubbed rifles as with sledges, hammered until some were fainting from exhaustion and were too weak to parry the thrusts of bayonets. Their hunting jackets were soggy wet, and their faces and chests were running with sweat and blood. My muscles strained to each Texan blow, and my soul, my whole soul, was there, and I was sobbing, sobbing fiercely. Now and again a yellow-clad figure went down, often of a neighbour I recognised, and in a flash I saw a cabin far away on the Guadalupe, and the wife made a widow and the children become orphans in this very instant that I gazed below me. Down there all the church, except at that far corner in front of Bowie's door, seemed a swaying ebon pave- ment of black-glazed^caps. Under the haze of powder ONE SUNDAY MORNING IN CHURCH 339 smoke they were squirming like maggots, pushing always toward that far corner. A half-dozen Texans who still remained on the platform overhead were firing down into them, and chubby Al Martin added one last blast from the six-pounder. The shot rent a hole in the ebon pavement, and spattered the walls with blood and brains and ragged pieces of flesh. Men slipped and fell in the ooze underfoot. For the drawing of a breath there was absolute silence, and after that the most fiendish outburst of rage I have ever heard. The Mexicans beat down one another to get to the ladder. Fully twenty gained the top, and I saw Al Martin struck down and his body flung over the parapet on the heads of those outside the church. The others around the six-pounder fared the same, all except two. One of these two turned and ran. He ran to the end of the platform, then along the north side wall. Half- way he came to the gap that had stopped me. But he faced about, let himself over the edge, and slid to the bottom of the gap. Then, even as his pursuers reached the spot and struck down at him, he lowered himself by the length of his arms, released his grip on the broken masonry, and dropped plump inside the church, squarely through the black fighting caps. The torch, thrust in a crack between the stones, was flaring just over his head. I knew now why he had run, how well he had calculated. Before the Mexicans nearest him could interfere, he seized the torch and disappeared in the sacristy. Beyond, in the crypt, was the powder magazine. I had one glimpse of his face, and his jaws were set like steel. At his heels, vainly clutching at him, were twenty Mexicans. I held my breath, clenched my own jaws, but I was praying that he would succeed. And the few cornered Texans yet fighting at Bowie's door, they would pray for that too, if they knew. Almost, 340 THE LONE STAR I thought, the explosion had come. By anticipation I felt myself being lifted, and I wondered at just what point death would follow, whether in the air, or on striking the ground. The suspense was a lifetime. Then, at last, the Mexicans came back out of the sacristy. Their faces were ghastly, but they were breathing again, and their bayonets were dripping. The other of the two men on the church roof who did not perish there was a long wiry fellow in fringed buck- skin. He was bareheaded, and his glossy hair was tossed and blown like the mane of a black stallion. With the others on the parapet he had stood against the Mexicans, and now he alone stood against them. "If for the right, go ahead!" It was a kind of battle cry. White-heat wrath surcharged his voice, yet even then the voice was rollicking. "Faith, ahead you go, Davy Crockett!" The challenge swelled recklessly, buoyantly, and all the while he struck, leaped, parried, struck, and struck again, with the vivid rapidity of lightning. He cleared his way to the head of the ladder. The ladder was weighted with more Mexicans climbing up. But he swept them off the top rung, off the rung below, and so descended rung by rung, as proud and terrible as a lion descending steps of marble. Then, at the bottom, as he swung on the denser crush of heads, his rifle, his adored Betsy, broke at the stock. Instantly frenzy took the man. He set forth one terrific howl, dashed the pieces at the mob, gripped his long knife in one hand, his tomahawk in the other, and became a flail, a scourge. The Mexicans crashed backward from him. The nearest he cut down, and at a bound he was among the cornered Texans still living and still fighting in front of Bowie's door. These weary ones shook the blood and sweat from their eyes, and nerved their flagging blows. ONE SUNDAY MORNING IN CHURCH 341 ' ' Go ahead, Davy Crockett ! Go a head Da vy Crock ett!" The thing became a quick, rhythmic beat, each beat a flash of time, marked by the hatchet. I saw steel thrust, saw it fleshed in him, yet those flaying arms still kept the measure. The Mexicans had climbed to the roof again, and they were shooting down into the last of the Texans. The scattered shots thick- ened to a volley, and when the smoke lifted there was only one yellow-clad figure rising above the heaps of corpses. "Go a " A storm of yells drowned the voice, the black wave swept forward, and the lone figure in yellow vanished beneath the surface. The door to Bowie's room Was cleared now, and the Mexicans leaped for it. tumbling over bodies, slipping on shreds of flesh, and jamming themselves in the en- trance through the thick walls. I could not see inside the baptistry, or Bowie on his cot, but I heard the report of his pistols. After that he must have used his knife, and no doubt he looked up at them from his bed with that mocking smile that so belittled others. They must have paused, too, with the awed hate of low creatures for the great and sublime. I imagined so, at least, from an instant's lull in the snarling and snapping. But at once the roar began again, sounding from within the room like a pack of dogs that tear a wildcat among them. Then it rose to a shout. The Mexicans inside pushed outward, the mass before the door heaved backward, making way, and the assailants struggled from the room, holding their bayonets over their heads, and on their bayonets the limp body of a man. His torn shirt was more red than white, and his blood was streaming down the bayonets. All around the pack howled as when the hunter holds the slain quarry aloft, and as the poor corpse was borne over the tossing sea of heads, the pack fought and yelped, and every bayonet jabbed at the 342 THE LONE STAR body. They reached the front doors at last, and there Jim Bowie was cast to the ground like a dead rat. Outside a regimental band was playing the " Deguello." Now the tune changed to the diana, that jubilant, rapid-fire blare that means the laurel wreath. Santa Ana on his white charger dashed up, and with sabre gallantly drawn, he leaned over and slashed at the corpse of Jim Bowie, CHAPTER XXXIII THE MASTER CRAFTSMAN rilHE rest of that bright March Sunday I lay in my A trough under the sun, and from the church below the heavy odours of blood drying and old powder smoke rose to my nostrils. Soldiers mounted to the roof and began throwing over the corpses. Often three or four Mexicans would come out on the side wall for a better view of the heaps of slain below, and talk among themselves in awed tones. I was covered with mortar dust as I lay ever so rigidly, yet had any of these looked sharply toward the arch, they must have seen me. But I was indifferent. There was too much else to rack the soul. There was the gory aftermath. The victors became ghoulish harvesters. Wet with blood to the knees, they sorted the horrid piles of dead. They viciously stabbed any Texan body that still pulsated with life. Everywhere glassy eyes looked up at them. Soldiery and townspeople thronged all day long over the old mission. In the church, or outside at the stock- ade, or in the plaza and rectangle, on the roofs, or below the walls, everywhere they had to pick their steps among the dead the Mexican dead. Heaped up at last, they could be estimated as cordwood. Every- where also the wounded moaned and groaned the Mexican wounded. Hundreds of them, they were being hauled away to the hospitals. Of dead and wounded both, the number was incredible; incredible also this havoc wrought by a few incomprehensible men of an incomprehensible race. The living Mexicans gazed 343 344 THE LONE STAR astounded. Their exultation "was hushed in supersti- tious awe. The regimental band played the thrilling diana again and again, but Santa Ana's triumph was palpably machine-made. The never-defeated victor reported the American slain at six hundred, the Mexican at sixty. This was only another vain flourish, like the blare of the trumpets. Neither could belie the day's humiliation put on his race. During the afternoon the dead Texans were thrown together and loaded into ox carts. They had given the Mexicans the hardest fight in all Mexican history, and now, though dead, they gave Mexican chivalry a rare chance on honour's side. But the President General of the Mexicans could squander no chivalry on heroes who had cost him so dearly. Over in the town, on a vacant lot, the Texan dead and logs of wood were piled high in alternating layers. Dry brush was heaped around, and crackling flames leaped up the pyre. But then, glory can afford a monument of ignominy from the enemy. When night at last cloaked that day, I was free to move. But I could not at once, for my nerves and muscles had stiffened along my bones, and it seemed that the first wrenching effort would break them. I Was afraid, too, that some sharper twinge of pain would make me groan aloud. But in time I sat erect, and I stretched and stretched, caring for nothing in that blessed relief to my spine. After that I lay down again, to rest a moment, and in a dull kind of apathy to wait and see if the Mexicans would not come up directly with their bayonets. The Mexicans, however, had left no survivors, so they thought, and they were worn out besides. Down in the church they were snoring. I raised up, and stretched again. I wanted to do nothing else for a long time. Yet at once I was squirming along the masonry to the lower rear wall, and there I twisted THE MASTER CRAFTSMAN 345 over the edge, hung a moment by my bent fingers, and let loose. I fell on ground softened by the ditch's overflow, but the cactus thorns pierced through my worn leather breeches to the bone. I rolled on my back and gazed upward at the stars, for I was very tired. Next I rolled myself into the heavier shadow of the ditch's bank, not so much from any animated sense of caution, but to see if I might do it as a feat of lazy sport. I looked at the stars again, and was dully curious if there would follow an alarm and prying bayonets. Nothing .hap- pened, and after a lapse of time I roused enough enter- prise for the next step. This meant creeping on south- ward through what had recently been the Mexican lines, and on farther to Seguin's rancho. And there, had Gritton written the truth, I should find Nan. The squat, blurred outline of the old Mexican farm- house vivified the thought of Nan, and that thought cleared my faculties. For almost the first time since the first shot of the morning's battle I could hold my mind to the fact that there had been something vital, some- thing preponderantly vital, which had been thrust upon me to decide; and that because of it I was not now a handful of ashes blown by the wind with the ashes of the one hundred and eighty men who had been my comrades in the flesh and blood only the night before. My senses awakened despite the long hours without food or sleep, and I approached stealthily under the cottonwoods toward the house. There were no signs of pickets, no hint of military occupation, nor aught to keep me from learning in ten minutes more if Nan were really there. I crawled beneath one of the front win- dows. It was curtained with canvas, but there seemed to be a faint candle light in the room. I reached between the window bars and tapped on the pane. No 346 THE LONE STAR movement came from within, and after a while I tapped again, and again I waited. No movement But there was a sudden rush of air behind me, like the swish of ghostly wings, and a blanket was thrown over my head, and an arm of iron was belting it around my neck. I ducked and struck with my only weapon, my fist, but through the thickness of the cloth I got a blow on the head, after which I was not concerned for a time with what further happened. When I did come to, the sun was stabbing through the cottonwood leaves overhead full upon my face. I had been dragged to the grove, and left there. And yet I had not been left there for dead, because a little wine bottle lay almost under my hand. The bottle held a good swallow of cognac, which revived me some. It was the calculation, then, that I should come to. The murderous assault on me the night before was either Wanton, or, at the least, exceedingly mysterious. But my perceptions were dulled, or glutted, I am not certain which, and I was no longer keenly inquisitive as to the extraordinary. When I tried to rise, I took even the blinding pains in my head as a matter of course, and was only dumbly aware of the festering sores on my legs made by the cactus thorns. I got to my feet and proceeded again toward the old ranch house. This time I was not interrupted. I stepped up to the door and knocked, knocked there as if this were an after- noon call in a city street, and my ragged leather jacket, caked with mud and filthy, a blue clawhammer with buttons of gold. Also, when I knocked, a gust of ill- temper disturbed my placid mood, for I thought I had ripped my glove. It was my bare hand, however. The blow had started the bruises there to running. I lifted my foot to kick the door, but the door opened, and there was Nan herself, and Deaf Smith's wife behind THE MASTER CRAFTSMAN 347 her, and Deaf Smith's little ones clinging to the skirts of both. I doffed my limp cap, and entered, smiling conventionally. Yet from the pitying horror on Nan's face and the stupefied gaze of Deaf Smith's wife, I gathered dimly that there might be something the matter with me, and wondered if it were my cravat. " Well, well," I said genially, though the words sounded raucous in my ears, "perhaps spring has come at last, don't you think? Beautiful day for the party yester- day. Miss Nan, still have those seven freckles, I see." The queer look on Nan's face deepened to pain. Ske half gasped, and abruptly turned away her head. "The party?" murmured Deaf Smith's wife. "Why yes," I replied, amiably taking a hide-bottom chair. "All San Antone was there, you know. Very quaint affair too, you know a coaching party in ox carts. Guests had to be loaded on, though; tumbled on like sacked potatoes. And afterward, the illumina- tion, the bonfire. But the flames would not lift sky- ward. Curious, don't you think? No, they sank back in the blackest smoke, and blinded the eyes and black- ened the hearts of all who came to the party. Yet they had Heaven's own day for it. You Were not there, Miss Buckalew? No, you you could not be there, could you?" Yet why did she suddenly put her fingers to her ears, and why was she staring at me like that again? All at once she gave a little cry, and ran over to me, and laid her cool hand on my head, above the right temple. "Harry, Harry," I heard her half sob. "Why, it's a great welt! What " "Souvenir of the party," I chirped. "The very quaintest But she was gone, blindly stumbling from the room. Odd way to treat a caller, really! She reappeared at 34 8 THE LONE STAR once, with a basin of water, and sent Deaf Smith's bewildered wife for towels. Together they set to work bathing my head, especially the welt over the temple, and I took it as a matter of course, like the serving of coffee, and smiled down patronisingly on the wide- eyed children. But whenever I looked up, which I often did to admire Nan's high Spanish comb and the fugitive glint of bronze in her lustrous hair, she screened her eyes from my gaze. Meantime the cold water was starting the very hottest kind of a fire in my brain, but at last a fit of shivering took me, and my eyes closed and my head went back, and I began to moan. Conscious now of the pain, I was growing con- scious of other things as well. For a long while, though, they kept on bathing my head, and I think I fell asleep. " Harry," Nan asked softly, "was it the the Alamo you were talking about?" "The party No, I mean Oh! " and I moaned again. "You can't mean, Harry, you can't mean that you were there?" "Was I! Well, I was invited. I mean yes, I was there, Nan." "But," she cried incredulously, "I heard that every man, every Texan, was killed?" "Yes, every fighting Texan." "But you, Harry? You " "I I was not fighting." Her cool hand dropped from my forehead. "Then " "Oh, I hid from them all right, and then But don't you see I am here?" "You hid?" The ringing scorn brought my eyes wide open. I sprang to my feet, for I was awake at last. THE MASTER CRAFTSMAN 349 "Nan," I demanded, "what danger are you in? Quick, tell me. I came to take you away." "Danger?" she repeated blankly. "Why " and she half laughed. The wave of her hand over her quiet surroundings, including Deaf Smith's wife and the children, was answer enough. There was no hint of danger here. "Of course," she went on, "we could hear the cannon over in the Alamo each morning, and then sounds of the battle yesterday, and," she added, with a sneer for herself, "I I always thought of you there. But Oh, as for me, I am safe enough, as you can see. I have Mr. Gritton to My jaws snapped to. "Yes, Mr. Gritton," I cried, "yes, and Mr. Gritton's note to me! That's why I hid, why I ran away. That's why I'm a coward, a leper you fear to touch. Mr. Gritton? The liar, the blackguard, he wrote me that you were in danger, and I am here now. He wrote more, Nan. Not that I believed it, but he wrote that" I faltered, but her look of gathering disgust spurred me hotly on "that you welcomed this particular danger, that knowing the danger came from Santa Ana, you " "Harry!" The cry of utter reproach brought me up short. "Well?" Her cheeks were aflame. She bit her lips. "Well?" I ventured again. "And you ask?" she cried. "You save yourself when those who are men stay to die, you did that! But I cannot be surprised, not when you come here whisper- ing such infamy of me. And then to say that another told you, to double the infamy of it, to hide cowardice behind such a " "Wait! Wait, you shall see the note." Her eyes opened in sudden hope. In hope, yes; 350 THE LONE STAR unmistakable, glorious hope, behind her tears. She swayed tremulously as my sore hands fumbled through my pockets. The hope was even glimmering faintly when I had to begin over again. I fumbled more desperately, for she was drawing away from me. "Well?" she said at last. "It's gone. Believe anything you like, for the note is gone. But now I know now I know why I was knocked on the head last night, outside that window. Gritton again! Your Mr. Gritton! Of course, he would not care to have me show you his note." "Harry, Harry!" Her unspeakable contempt was not aroused now for my supposed lying that was done already but for the sheer clumsiness of it. "Then why," excitedly interposed Mrs. Smith, "did Mr. Gritton write you the note?" Good and gullible soul, she believed me. And she hoped I would clear myself. Yet what was the answer? Why had Gritton written a note that had saved me from death in the Alamo? No Wonder my tale sounded preposterous! Villains, you know, usually plot death for their rivals. But while the supercilious Englishman was not one to exalt any man to the height of rivalry with himself, he would certainly be indifferent, too, as to whether I saved my- self or not. So there I was, back to the question again, and my poor head throbbing like all fury. He had saved me. But why, why? His motive was connected with Nan; this much was positive. Yet could my death by any leap of imagination interfere with his chances? My head pounded worse, for here was a brand new clue. Now Gritton had frowned, there at the fandango, when Nan braved Santa Ana for my sake. He had frowned, though, only on what he regarded as a young girl's caprice. Of course, her feeling toward me could be no more than whim since he, Gritton, was near. But a young girl's fancy easily blazes to glorifica- tion of the object. Now then, now then if I had died in the Alamo! A living man may not be a rival. But a memory? A memory as a rival, that is different. Even Gritton had this much respect for the efficacy of Death. However, there was no possibility now of fancy blazing to glorification. The very whim was destroyed. Gritton had sa\*ed me, and so had made me the present miserable wretch in Nan's eyes. There was a some- thing so hellish in this crafty playing on human nature that I recoiled to think that such a man as Gritton were abroad on the face of the earth. I had the right solution, truly enough, but the proof was lost. The devilish master-craftsman had seen to that. I could not answer Mrs. Smith's charitable question after all. Nan would only think me more clumsily ingenious, and I did not try. "But at least you do know, Nan," I said, for after all I was not there to redeem myself, but to save her, "you do know this, that Gritton has been a spy all along. I overheard him admit it that night at the fandango, before you came. He's the one we have to thank for Santa Ana's invasion, for the quarrels among ourselves that made invasion possible, for the loss only yesterday of all those lives in the Alamo." "I do not wonder," Nan mused sorrowfully, "that any member of the Council would like to believe that." "But don't you know," I cried, "that the fellow is a Mexican spy?" "Why, how could I, when I found him Santa Ana's prisoner; when that same night he turned on three Mexican soldiers following us here, and killed them every one?" 352 THE LONE STAR I picked up my cap. I would end this call. But even with my hand on the latch, I turned to plead. "Listen Nan," I said, "won't you let me help you away from here? Your father " "You might," she replied, "ask that of Mr. Gritton himself. I see him coming now. He lives in the smoke- house, where he hides from you: know from his Mexican employers." Through the window I saw the drooped figure of the Englishman lazily approaching. On the threshold he stroked his moustache. "Oh ah?" he said Well, I was a disreputable specimen "Ah yes, to be sure, Mr. Ripley, sir. Hon- oured, I-ah, assure you. Come to help Miss Buckalew away, you say?" Nan had repeated my question " Dee-uh me, now I must observe that that was thought- ful, very. But the ladies have-ah accepted the escort to the settlements of your humble servitor, and they so far distinguish him as to regard the escort-ah as efficient. They only wait until this Sant' Ana, the devilfish, y'know, leaves what is left of the campaign to his generals, and sets out for Mexico. A few days, re-ahly, no more." "But," cried Nan to me, "you do not have to go yet. You are not able." I was going, nevertheless. There are some things beyond human endurance, and to see Nan with this fellow was a thing akin to them. I could not render her the service for which I had come, and there was nothing but to go on my way. That way led south, to Fannin and his army at Goliad, to my brother Phil, to Nan's father. At least that way led to fighting. "If you will have the goodness," said Gritton, "to pass by the corral, you will find your horse still there." "Which Mr, Ripley left," observed Nan, looking at THE MASTER CRAFTSMAN 353 Gritton from levelled eyes, "as he went to the Alamo. You know, Mr. Gritton, that Mr. Ripley escaped from the Alamo to help me away from here. He had received a a note, saying that I needed help." "Ah?" said Gritton, with never a tremor of his sandy lashes. "Ah, indeed? Escaped to rescue a dis- tressed damsel, you say? I wonder! Could it not be possible, now, that Mr. Ripley, sir, saved his life for a-ah better reason? I mean-ah to save his life. Suppose, some time, when he has the leisure, that he ask himself that of his own soul. To be sure, y' know, he had the distressed damsel in his mind, but in his soul now, there's the-ah answer to the question." And afterward, toiling southward, I did ask that of my own soul. Again and again, I asked it. The master craftsman had put there the heinous doubt. Not only had he made me despicable in the eyes of the brave girl, he had made me so in my own eyes. The subtle Lucifer that he was, he even intrigued between a man and his own soul. CHAPTER XXXIV "THE DEAR PREROGATIVE OF LIFE" NEVER in this world, it seemed, would I cover the eighty odd miles to Fannin's little army. As a matter of deadliest fact, there was scarcely an hour when Eternity, the most distant thing in life, was not nearer to me than the old mud town and fortress mis- sion of Goliad. Cavalry squads, Mexicans of course, ranged the flats to the coast, and a lone fugitive horse- man could never have evaded them. The very first time I ducked to hiding in a clump of scrub oak, I abandoned my horse, and with head and shoulders bent low, I ran on foot through the thorny chaparral until I fell. There I lay, a whited lump in the white dust of the parched desert. Day after day were days of just such crouching, sometimes in the powdered alkali, often in the mud and icy rain. I kept clear of trails, but as near the river as possible, so that at night I might drink or bathe my sore feet. The few settlers of this barren wilderness were all hurrying eastward, as if the monster of the Alamo rode just behind. They gave me food when they crossed my path. Once I watched a deserted hut for hours from the brush, and at last crept up to it, to find words of illiterate welcome scrawled on the door. I was to take what I needed, and leave the rest for the next fugitive. This was my heartiest meal, a stack of tor- tillas already moulding. Another time I met a raw- boned Irishman from the San Patricio settlement. He Was trudging on foot beside a huge cart goading on 354 "THE DEAR PREROGATIVE OF LIFE" 355 the oxen. The cart was laden with his tribe of little ones and their gaunt mother. They urged me to go on eastward with them, but seeing that argument was useless, the Irishman produced an extra flintlock from his household goods and made me take it, though I debated with myself if I had the strength to carry the extra weight. At last, on the thirteenth day of plodding toil, in the afternoon, I came within ten miles of Goliad. The weather was thick and foggy, yet I expected to reach the old fortress by night, or at least make sure if Fannin still held it. But I did not find myself there until one day later, and then in a way totally different from what I had hoped. The chain of events leading up to that starts with a battle. When so near to Goliad, I thought I heard thunder, and stopped to listen. The rumbling sound was familiar enough of late, even though muffled under the fog. It was cannonading, off eastward to my left. There must be the fight, ready prepared and being served, for which I had come. My feet, bleeding through the holes in my brogans, grew lighter, and I shouldered the old flintlock instead of dragging it as I cut through the high wet grass of the prairie. On account of the fog, the cannonading was not so far away as it sounded. Abruptly the deep roar leaped to the shriller key of musketry, and there were yells and the beating of hoofs. Almost at once the spectral shapes of wildly fleeing dragoons loomed big out of the the haze. They were routed, scattered, and plunging full toward me. I dropped to my face in the grass, and as they thundered past, bullets whistled breast high, and strewed the prairie around me with the bodies of horses and Mexicans. Evidently the dragoons had just charged, and just as evidently they wished they hadn't. Not giving them time to form again behind me, I 356 THE LONE STAR crept swiftly through, the grass on toward the firing. In this I calculated luckily, for I had passed through the Mexican lines; or rather, the stampeding Mexican lines had passed me by. I was on the inner rim of a circle, and at the centre, not fifty yards ahead, there developed in the mist that tableau of tragedy which has become almost the symbol of our Western plains. I mean a wagon train surrounded by Indians on the open prairie, and the wagons transformed into a barricade for desper- ate resistance. In the fog the tableau looked so at first. But instead of Indians, they were Mexicans that so vengefully encompassed the hollow square of carts and dead pack mules. Also, the besieged were all armed men, fully three hundred of them, except for several women fugitives under their protection. Moreover, the cannon distinguished them from the usual wagon train. They had a brass piece at each corner of the hollow square, and four or five others besides ; short sixes, long and short fours, and a six-inch howitzer. And yet, though they were a military band, there was something heartbreakinglyunmilitary about their tactics. The blundering was so crass, so suicidal, even to my eyes, that I could not at first believe that here was really Fannin's little army. Fannin was a West Pointer, and he should have known better. He had presumed to teach the science of war to the rest of Texas. He had sneered at our farmer, lawyer, doctor and merchant tacticians. He had supplanted Houston. Yet he had allowed our last armed force to be entrapped on the open prairie, surrounded by a thousand Mexican infantry, not to mention the cavalry that had retreated out of range. Here of all places, in a basin-like depression, he had halted to graze his animals. This was evident from the dead horses and mules, without harness or packs, that were scattered around the hollow square "THE DEAR PREROGATIVE OF LIFE" 35/ just as they had been killed at the first attack. And yet, only half a mile beyond, there was the dark outline of timber, and timber would have meant a fortress as compared with this shallow open basin- The stampeded dragoons had left a gap in the cordon around the hollow square, and through the gap I had crawled, and was still crawling toward the besieged. A slightly wounded Mexican in the grass tried to stab me, and I had to club him down, but this was the only obstacle in my tedious progress. From all the other sides the Mexicans were firing into the pit of the basin. They were dumfounded at the failure of the cavalry charge, and enraged that they could not exterminate the few exposed Americans at a blow. Still, they had to change their tactics to this long distance firing, and luckily for the Americans, they had no artillery. Fannin's youngsters, on the other hand, had already acquired the deadliness with firearms of our race. They were shoot- ing almost like the veteran plainsmen of the Alamo. Wherever a cautious Mexican raised in the grass to aim, he usually fell dead that same instant. Crawling yet nearer, I noticed one of the young Americans particularly, mostly because he was so eager to do the shooting for the whole army. He was slender and agile, and again and again I saw him leap in full view on the barricade, take aim and fire, then pause to make sure that he had hit, and as he always did, he would give a happy shout as he leaped down again. Once an officer ordered him to lie low, and he resented it hotly. But he got his billet at last. They lifted him into a cart, and I could make out that one of the women was caring for him. Yet before long his head appeared over the cart bed, and again he fired, and again he hit his man. Three times more he did this same thing, and always with the same result. But the fourth time he 358 THE LONE STAR lurched backward in the cart. The wilful youngster had gotten his second billet. However, I was among them by now. Something in that boyish figure had started me to crawling faster, and when he fell the second time, I sprang to my feet, yelling at them not to shoot, and ran for it the rest of the way. All there were pitifully ragged and haggard, and yet they exclaimed at my own frightful appearance. But I paid no attention to their welcome, not even when the ejaculation was " W'y, young Rip!" and came from none other than Old Man Buckalew. I pushed straight for that cart in the barricade where I had seen the boy, and there he was, lying on his back, and frowning impatiently; and there also was Mrs. Long, cutting away the sleeve of his jacket. The first shot had broken his thigh, the second his right arm. "Hey there, Harry," he cried as soon as I bent over him, "and did you see me get 'em? Didn't I, Aunt Jane, two Mexies for each of these?" By "these" he meant his wounds. I fell to my knees, and raised his head, and kissed him on the brow. "Phil, Phil," I cried to the sound of bullets hissing overhead, "when will you get enough?" "Oh not" his teeth clicked to lock in a groan "not yet, if the Doc can can find time to rope up this darned arm a little." The Doc was on hand already. He was Jack Shackle- ford, captain of the Red Rovers, and the Red Rovers were a company of splendid young volunteers from Alabama. When Dr. Shackleford was not bandaging the wounded, Captain Shackleford was fighting among his Red Rovers. He needed only a little while to put my brother in splints. "Now Harry," said Phil coaxingly, as soon as "THE DEAR PREROGATIVE OF LIFE" 359 Shackleford was out of hearing, "would you mind loading for me too? I can't, you know, this arm." "Nor shoot either. You're " "Can't I?" And before either Mrs. Long or I could stop him. he had propped himself against the side of the cart. " Now," he said, "see that hillock off there? Well, those fellows aren't Mexicans. Not much, they're shooting too good. They're Campeachies. Don't you understand, they're Indians, sure 'nough Indians, and Harry, I've I've never got an Indian yet. Please Harry, just just one, before it's too dark." "And then will you lie quiet?" "Yes, yes." I loaded his rifle for him, and by the aid of a rest he fired from his left shoulder at the first shaven head and scalp lock to appear above the grass on the hillock. He missed, but at the next trial he achieved his childhood's ambition. He had actually slain a Redskin. Others of our best marksmen continued to fire at the hillock, though they now had only the flashes to aim by, and not until they finally silenced the Indians did Phil give us any peace. But Mrs. Long and I both held him to his promise, though he maintained that he had forgotten it entirely, and we must be mistaken. The enemy caused us no more trouble that night. Through the cold misting rain we could see their camp- fires around us, and all night long the hoarse challenging of their sentinels was constantly in our ears. Their bugles sounded every five minutes. It was a cheerless night; a night of suffering for those in the barricade. Fannin declared that our only chance lay in cutting through to the timber. He valued that timber very highly now, since he had discovered that the Mexicans really did presume to attack him. He himself was the first hit; yet with a ball in the groin ; he limped coolly 360 THE LONE STAR about among the men. Jack Shackleford and the other captains of volunteers had begged him to keep on to the timber, but Fannin had only intimated that they were afraid of the Mexicans. Now, however, when it was too late, when five of Shackleford 's Red Rovers were killed, and more than half the company were wounded, when the other companies were in like condition, when the small hollow square was muddy with blood, then Jack Shackleford and the other captains refused the only chance point blank. Their disabled ones, martyrs to Fannin's obstinacy, could not be taken along, since all the teams were killed, and if Fannin imagined that those wounded boys were to be left behind ... I shouldn't wonder if there were plain language used at that gloomy council of war. The result was that we laboured in the dank fog with picks and shovels, throwing up an earthwork Also we contracted our barricade, making the hollow square smaller, and reinforced it with the slain oxen. The moans of our unsheltered wounded never ceased. They cried out in delirium for water, and we had none. Over in the timber, a half mile away, water flowed in the Coleto, but the Mexicans were there. One poor boy was shivering. If we could only give him a blanket? But we had none. Others wanted food, only a crust to gnaw on. But we had none. By some incomprehensible stupidity, the provisions had been left behind. Once Mrs. Long called me to Phil. In his fever he had loosened the bandages on his hip, and was thrusting his fingers in the wound to tear the hole bigger. Old Man Buckalew and I held him, while Dr. Shackleford tied his hands and dressed the wound over again, "Harry," whispered Phil at last, "isn't the grass wet in all this fog? Can't you just lay a little of it on my lips?"' "THE DEAR PREROGATIVE OF LIFE" 361 The piteous beseeching in his eyes drove me frantic. This, then, was the aftermath of our glorious Matamoras fever; a part of the aftermath. But I forgot my own blame. "Oh damn Fannin!" I cried. "Damn him, damn him " I was growing incoherent. "Just what I said," muttered Old Man Buckalew, "when we started for the Alamo, and he turned back 'cause a wheel busted." So that was the reason! Compared with a broken axle, to think of the obstacles being met at that moment by the heroes of the Alamo! "But that was three weeks ago," I protested. " Why aren't you a hundred miles east by this time, or at least, why didn't you stay behind the walls of Goliad?" "'Damn' again," growled Buckalew. "Sam Houston's got together a hund'erd or so scairy corn- shucking fanners at Gonzales, if they haven't all deserted by now after this Alamo news, and he's been ordering us to come on for two weeks past, and yet we only just started this morning." "But " " Kind o' late for 'buts' now, sonny. 'Stead of lighting out instanter with every last man Jack, and 'most five hund'erd at that, and the only army left us, too, Fannin had to go and divide it. Sent one company south to rescue a family or two he'd heard about at Refugio. Then sent some more companies to rescue the first one, and we haven't heard of none of them since. So this morning he got tired waiting, and began to obey Hous- ton's orders, and here we are. But contrary -wise," he added softly, the mist clouding his eyes behind the tortoise-shell specs, "contrary -wise, I wish I might see my girl Nan just once more." 362 THE LONE STAR As to Nan herself, the old man was not in that state of anxiety that I had expected. The reason was simple. Nan had written him, Deaf Smith's wife had written him, and so had Gritton, and the all-efficient Gritton had procured the delivery of the letters. So Nan's father knew that Nan was safe, and his only grief was the cruel likelihood of never seeing her again. Nor would I add to his sorrow by any word of Gritton's villainy, especially since, as regarded Nan at least, the baffling Englishman seemed an honourable protector, even when it came to defying Santa Ana himself. Likewise I told nothing of my being in the Alamo. Until this appears, indeed, it will not be known, except to a very few, that there was actually a survivor of the Alamo. The non-combatants who were spared, like the women, Dickinson's child, and Travis's negro servant, have always believed that I had been sent out for aid previous to the final attack. The pretenders, though, are amusing, and ingenious. Every now and then one of these apocryphal old chaps turns up, but I only smile, and never contradict. My story, because it involves Nan's name, can keep for another generation or so. The next day was Sunday, exactly two weeks after the last day in the Alamo, and this Sunday again found us surrounded by that resource of cowards, wolves, and War, an enormous preponderance of numbers. Dawn revealed the Mexicans spread out in fearsome array. They were even deploying two or three hundred pack mules to render their force the more imposing. Within the barricade the cannon ammunition was about exhaus- ted, but the stiffened and shivering youngsters charged their pieces with canisters of musket balls and the how- itzers with grist. They had a thousand spare muskets besides, ready and loaded, and now these were divided. The encompassing circle around us tightened, and grew "THE DEAR PREROGATIVE OF LIFE" 363 smaller and denser, and always nearer, like claws about to rend. There was an uncanny confidence in this approach quite different from the prudence of the day before, a prudence they had learned after the three hundred boy volunteers had accounted for more than their own number in dead Mexicans. "They look to me," ejaculated one of the Grays one of the eighteen or twenty Grays still alive "yes they do, they look to me like they sure been multiplying." And this was the reason for that disconcerting confi- dence. The Mexicans could not be fewer than fifteen hundred. They had been reinforced during the night. "So long as as they haven't artillery," said Fannin. But with the first volley a discharge of grape cut a withering swath through our barricade. In its path not one of our boys was left standing. Their bodies lay scattered and writhing. The Mexicans did have cannon. It was the dramatic moment, the moment of despair. "Now then," shouted Fannin coolly, the most con- spicuous mark of all, "give it back to them! That's' right! Now again!" "God A'mighty, sir, we cain't," protested a gunner. "This howitzer's red hot now, and there ain't a drop of water to sponge the thing with." "Let it cool then. Use your rifle." "There's not three rounds left," said Jack Shackleford. Another charge of grape swept through the barricade. A captain of volunteers snatched out his handkerchief. "Put that rag out of sight," ordered Fannin. "We whipped 'em off yesterday, and- "And we would to-day, to the last man, if " "If it wasn't for the wounded," said Shackleford. "Can't you hear them moaning for water? The only way to get it is to " Yet he, and all of them, hesitated before the word. 364 THE LONE STAR "If you mean surrender," sneered Fannin, "then " A musket ball struck his rifle on the stock. And above the terrific fire the Mexican cannon boomed again. "There, you see!" cried yet another officer. "It's the question of an hour at the outside before every man of us " Fannin "wavered. Even he quailed before the respon- sibility of exterminating those who had made him their leader. "Then put it to a vote," he said. The captains ran to their companies, and the com- panies voted, yelling above the din. They voted for surrender, almost every one. In all mercy, they had to. The pitiful agony of the wounded drove them to it. I was at Phil's side through this, and he clutched my sleeve fiercely. "Don't!" he cried, and I obeyed him. But that was only because they did not need my vote. At once Fannin raised his handkerchief, and limped out toward the Mexicans, followed by two others. "Remember," Shackleford called after them, "we agree to nothing that means leaving these wounded boys." Three of the enemy met our emissaries half way, and when Fannin returned, he announced bitterly that we were prisoners of war. The Mexicans agreed to a formal capitulation, and he had their word of honour, besides the terms written out in English and Spanish, and duly signed. The usages of civilised nations were to prevail. We were to be taken to Goliad, the wounded men to go in carts, and be properly cared for. The volunteers would be sent back to the States, on giving their parole not to return. And when we stacked arms, scowling and with wry faces, one of the Mexican officers a German soldier of fortune he was spoke to us comfort- ingly: "Bien, senores, in ten days, liberty and home." "THE DEAR PREROGATIVE OF LIFE" 365 That same afternoon those of us who could walk were herded against the cold March wind to Goliad. Old Man Buckalew was at my side, and once more we climbed the hill to the old mission, but not as we had climbed it at midnight one night, to storm and take the place. There were five times more of us now, and yet we entered there as prisoners. The stronghold, the gateway to Texas, which fifty of us had won, had been abandoned to the Mexicans. The walls were blackened with smoke, showing where Fannin had tried to fire the place before leaving. We were crowded into the dark ruined stone chapel where we had locked the Mexican garrison. The place was more like a gloomy vault. That night they gave us each a lump of beef. We scraped off the vermin, and ate the meat raw. There was neither bread nor salt. Fannin hotly referred the Mexicans to their agreement, but there were those among us who had the philosophy to laugh at Fannin's simplicity. Not until two days later were the wounded brought to even this miserable shelter. Some of them were dying already from exposure. Their guards had snatched off what blankets they had. Even the surgical instru- ments were stolen, and Shackleford and our other physicians were taken from us to care for the Mexican wounded. When I tried to save Phil from being kicked, the brute who did it drove his bayonet in my arm. The others fared the same, and for our mutinous protests we were tightly bound. But there was the Senora Alvarez, the tender-hearted wife of a good Mexican officer. She came to us with Mrs. Long, and she loosened our cords. She sent us wholesome things to eat. The sick quickly outnumbered the wounded, but these two women were our nurses. Then one hundred and twenty-five more prisoners 3 66 THE LONE STAR I should say as many ragged, barefoot, half-starved boys, many not over sixteen were also herded into the Black Hole. They were the Georgia Battalion, com- manded by Major Ward. He called them his little brothers. They were the ones Fannin had sent to Refugio. A thousand Mexicans had surrounded them in the mission there, and they had repulsed the Mexicans with their rifles. After that, having no more powder, they cut their way into the swamp. In the swamp they began to perish, and the rest surrendered. They told us news of the first company, numbering twenty-three, sent out by Fannin. These were overpowered by cavalry, tied to post oaks, fusilladed, and left for the buzzards. We were now more than four hundred in the ruined chapel. Literally our bodies covered one another as we slept on the stone floor. We were cramped the more because we had to keep the space cleared between the two doors. If not, there was a cannon loaded with grape in one doorway. The place reeked with foul odours. It was a hell of groans and delirium and fevered curses. After the Alamo, this other holy edifice! until a church became for me, not the symbol of divine love, but of human atrocity. And as for the Sabbath day, I almost wish at times that that day could be blotted from the calendar. Into the pest hole, yet eighty more were crammed. These were fresh volunteers, who had been equipped and sent to us by the women of Nashville. But their ship had run aground on the Texan coast, and the Mexicans had captured them as they landed. They had never as yet borne arms against Mexico, but even so, we could not understand why they were distinguished from the rest of us by a dirty strip of white rag tied on each man's arm. According to the terms of surrender, "THE DEAR PREROGATIVE OF LIFE" 367 we all expected release, and we were the more confident because one of the Mexican colonels had taken Fannin with him to Copano, there to learn what ships were in port and arrange for our transportation to New Orleans. But there was one episode that rose to treacherous significance for at least two of us. The officer who acted as head jailor was making his round of inspection. He also had his usual bodyguard, chosen from a regiment of Yucatan Indians. These could make pathways through the crowded prisoners, kick or roll the sick out of the way, prod us satisfactorily with their bayonets, threaten and bully, and altogether were a guarantee of the jailor's safety and comfort. But this time the jailor had a companion who was more efficient than any. He needed no bayonet. His great hairy fists were enough. I recognised his insolent swaggering hulk as soon as he appeared in the dark church. As the inspection proceeded, he thrust his nose in the face of each helpless captive, and leered out of his one malevo- lent eye. The wounded or sick he jerked up to a sitting posture, looked once, and pushed them back to the floor again. When he reached me, and peered into my face, his one eye gleamed in evil triumph. But most I looked at the livid red slit that had been his other eye. "Balls o' fire, the little compadre, ef 'tain't!" he exclaimed, and jabbed his thumbs into my eyes until I screamed with the pain. I never expected to see again in this world, but the jailor and the Yucatan Indians pulled him back, and none too soon. "Imbecile," cried the jailor in a scared voice, "you will have them murdering us! " "Bah, when they're tied?" " But for all that, sefwr, I never go that far. Besides, you said that he was an old man you were looking for." 3 68 THE LONE STAR "And this one also, mi capitan, this one also. You may ask Sant' Ana." "Bien, bien," said the jailor. "It is a small matter, anyway." And with that he tied a rag on my arm; not a white one, but a red one. A small matter or not, I darted here and there among the prisoners until I found Old Man Buckalew. "You keep moving," I whispered to him. "Kind of slipping around in the crowd. Here now, quick, they're just over there, and they're hunting for you." "Who are? What's ailing you, young Rip?" "It's Lush Yandell, I tell you, and he's got a red rag for you too." The jailor finished his inspection, and was as usual mightily satisfied with himself, but at the door Yandell burst into an argument of vile Spanish oaths. The name of Santa Ana, however, was more potent yet, for the jailor shrugged his shoulders, and ejaculated: "Bien, bien, have your own way." This way meant that We were marched single-file through the door of the church, and that when Buckalew passed, Yandell struck out his fist and marked him for his own. The jailor then tied on the red rag, and we were all packed back into the church again. CHAPTER XXXV THE GOLIAD MATINS LUSH YANDELL paid us his visit on Saturday, one week after the battle on the Coleto. Fannin was brought back the same evening from the coast, and he announced that all arrangements were made for our speedy release. Though he had to be carried to the cot they had given him in the barracks, yet he stayed with us a little and talked hopefully of joining his wife and children very soon. The Black Hole was as cheerful as a fireside that night. The jailor and his bodyguard returned, and cut the ropes from our arms. The jailor didn't think any of us would want to try to escape now, and he tore the red badge from my sleeve, and from Buckalew's also. One of the Kentucky Mustangs, as those mettlesome young Kentuckians called them- selves, drew a flute from his jacket and played "Home Sweet Home." The holy edifice we were in never echoed to a holier note, even though the old walls were a century old. Just about four hundred and fifty Amer- ican boys thought of their mothers, and as they sang their eyes of warriors bold grew weepy. The next morning, Sunday morning, bugles and drumbeats awoke us at four o'clock. We were ordered to fall in line by companies, and the rumour buzzed happily that we were to march to Copano, and there take ship for New Orleans. Fannin and the other wounded would follow later in carts, while our surgeons had to stay behind to help the Mexicans. Yet I thought it odd that the Nashville volunteers, with white rags 369 370 THE LONE STAR on their arms, should also be left behind, and the ner- vousness of the Mexican officers when we questioned them was peculiar. I asked to stay with Phil, but the jailor refused. I would see him again within a few hours at most, said he, and added, "at Copano"; whereat one of his bodyguard laughed as at a subtle joke. Mrs. Long came in while I was pleading. The Senora Alvarez had just brought her the good news, she said, and she had hurried here to look after Phil and the other sick boys on their journey to the coast. Our lines were already marching out, and the jailor again ordered me to my place. Mrs. Long urged me also, and I knelt down beside Phil to tell him good-bye. Some impulse made me stoop and kiss him on the brow. Then with Buckalew at my side, I fell into line. The air of that Palm Sunday morning was well worth breathing, and each man of us thankfully filled his lungs as we passed out the door. Our guards were formed in hollow squares to receive us, and we marched in single file between two files of Mexicans. Dragoons and lancers flanked us, or rode behind. Off ahead the Kentucky Mustang Was playing his flute to quick time, and the long line of some three hundred and fifty ragged boys and men stepped it jauntily, first down the hill, then through the ravine-like street of the squalid, cutthroat town. The mud walls were lined with the evil population of the place, but except for a jeer now and then they did no hooting. They rather stared at us in mute fascination, and in a kind of awe and pity too. Yellow, withered old beldames in doorways murmured "Pobrecitos" as we passed, and talked to one another in low excited tones. In front of Mrs. Long's door stood the Senora Alvarez, and there were tears in her eyes. She ran into the street, and stopped an officer of dragoons. "Just this one, senor capitan, just this one," she THE GOLIAD MATINS 371 begged. "Only see, how young he is, and I want him I want him for a servant." She pointed to one of the Georgia Battalion, who was indeed hardly more than a child. The Mexican captain twisted uneasily in his saddle, glanced up and down to see if any superior officer were near, then hurried the boy out of the ranks. The Senora Alvarez as quickly got him into the house. There were other incidents as puzzling. A drop of water fell on my hand, and looking up, I saw a fat priest leaning over the parapet of a roof. He was sprinkling water on us as we threaded our way through the nar- row street. Next, a Mexican colonel came galloping past us in a greatly agitated, indignant and dumfound- ed state. He reined up before the captain of guards, our late jailor, and gesticulated vehemently. "It is not possible!" he cried. "It cannot be, no, no, no!" "But it is, mi coronet," replied the captain. "The third order came last night, from Santa Ana himself." "Shame, shame!" "But you know we protested, protested at the first order, at the second, and now this third one is imperative. What can we do?" "Do? As you please, senor, but I . " He tore from his breast his red scarf of a colonel, and hurled it from him as though it were degradation. His epaulettes followed, and his sabre he broke over the horn of his saddle. "Do?" he sneered. The captain shrugged his shoulders, and ordered the march continued. And on ahead the Kentuckians were singing "Home Sweet Home." Once outside the town our long file was broken into three divisions, and each one turned in a different direction. "Necessary to gather some wood first," growled our jailor. The 372 THE LONE STAR division I was in followed the river road for perhaps a mile; then the order came to halt. We dressed ranks with our backs to the river. At the same time the file of guards behind us marched around and doubled the line of guards in front. Thus they faced us, not ten paces away. Many of them were quivering as if with ague. Others grinned in a ghastly kind of expectancy. The lancers were drawn up on either flank. Our jailor was white to the lips under his yellow skin. "Take off your knapsacks," he said to us. Buckalew and I had none, and thus we saw that as the boys started to obey, the jailor braced himself, trembled, and stuttered out the word, "Now!" In a flash the guards threw their muskets at aim. "My God, boys, they're going to " The volley poured into us, and the long line of young Americans that had stood erect an instant before were writhing bodies on the ground. Possibly twenty, Buckalew and I among them, had seen in time, and were running for our lives toward the river. But the lancers pursued, and as they overtook a poor stumbling panting boy, drove a spear through his back. One or two of our brave fellows dropped to their knees intheinstant of the lance's thrust, and begged for mercy , or prayed to Heaven. Their shrieks will never, never cease to ring in my ears. Behind me the cries were all but smothered in the impish howls of the assassins. Yet there were shouts of defiance too: "Let us die like men! " " Hurrah for Texas, anyhow! " And again, curses; the bitterest curses on those murderers that a man may ever hear. One glance over my shoulder, and I saw that very few were killed outright. The Mexicans were finishing their clumsy butchery. Here and there a groping, blinded lump of tattered flesh and rags would struggle up from THE GOLIAD MATINS 373 a pulsating heap, to be stabbed down again with bay- onets. The Mexicans remembered their heavy loss on the Coleto, and the humiliation to their arms made them fiends now that they could spill American blood in safety. Other volleys sounded from down the river, and then scattering shots, and I knew that our other divisions Were faring the same. The law was executed, that law of Santa Ana's congress by which armed foreigners should be dealt with as pirates. Of three hundred and fifty or more, less than thirty escaped; which, however, is a comment on the ghastly bungling. Buckalew and I, and possibly ten others of our divi- sion, gained the river, threw off our jackets, and plunged in. The underbrush fringing the stream retarded our mounted pursuers, and only one of these made his horse take the water. The river was narrow and we swam it easily. We gained the opposite bank, crashed through the thicket, and reached the open prairie. Then behind us grew the pounding of hoofs, and soon, almost over our shoulders, came laboured breathing, as of some pursuing monster. Poor Old Man Buckalew was winded. The air wheezed in his lungs, and a little farther along he tripped on a root. The other fugitives passed us as I stopped to pick him up. The horse behind reared to his haunches almost on us, and I went down under a swinging blow of a lance across my head. \ rolled into the grass, and scrambled to my knees, but got no further. The horseman poised his lance in air as a hunter would spear a boar. "Ho, the little compadre!" Our pursuer was Lush Yandell. The socket of the eye I had taken from him was blood red. "An' my hide fur skillet grease, ol' Buck, ef 'tain 't!" He cocked his hairy misshapen head, and a gruesome chuckling rattled in his throat. His one eye gloated 374 THE LONE STAR lustfully as he clutched the lance more to his notion for this particular work. A belated spattering of musketry told us that they were finishing up across the river. Yandell raised his head quickly, and listened. We heard two or three last shrieks. A sickening, dis- gusting, maudlin look came over Yandell's murderous face. "Gawd, Gawd!" he blubbered. "Gawd, I've had enough! The blood of white men of white men Cain't stan' 'nother drop! I've had 'nough!" And the man whined for mercy; to the skies, to the horizon, to us, to Buckalew, to me. He was drunk on blood, and he grovelled and slobbered, and at last, bellowing to Heaven through his moans and gasps, he spurred his horse, and dashed wildly, aimlessly, across the prairie, reeling in his saddle. In the swamps be- yond he must have floundered, and rotted as he died. Lush Yandell, the coarsest, trashiest, the most brutish of men, an ape rather than a man But there, you who are presumptuous enough may try to explain. I can- not. Still, it is not unlikely that Lush Yandell had a soul after all, else he would be perfectly explicable. Buckalew and I stared after him with hanging jaws. The old man came first out of the daze, and his mouth twitched lugubriously. "Might 'ave left us his hawse," he muttered. He sat and pondered, and after a while, one by one, the tears rolled down his cheeks. Abruptly he twisted his shaggy moustache between his teeth. "Lord, Lord," he burst out With a shudder, "all them pore, pore devils!" "I suppose we are saved now," I mused dumbly. " But the further away saved, the safer. Here, young Rip, we got to be moseying." " I I must go back. Phil " THE GOLIAD MATINS 37S "Oh, they aren't that low," he protested. "Your powder-can brother is among the wounded, and they shorely wouldn't " But I could see that his assurance came from horror of the thought, and not from conviction. "I must know" I said. "And I," he retorted, getting to his feet, "can see in your face that you'll just go plump in among 'em again. Come along." But it was not to urge me away. He himself led back toward the river. "I'll see to you, first," he grumbled, "for I reckon you'll count as one, all right, and I'm going to bring the very last man I can, self included, to General Sam Houston. There's a certain piece of work for us, boy, after this mawning's work, and you think I'll lose you now ? I ' ve got in mind another day and place for you and me to die in, and it 's not to-day and here, neither. But come along, and we'll try to rest you up easy first about Phil." How he proposed to do that, I don't know, but we went on retracing our steps very cautiously; and then, abruptly stopped short. Faint and smothered it was, but we heard it, another crackling sputter of musketry fire. This volley was not along the river, but far away, off behind the town, and up on the hill, like a muffled echo of the others. I looked involuntarily at Buckalew, and he at me, but he shifted his gaze quickly. I saw, though, the depth of pity there for me. The same appalling suspicion had unnerved us both, and his con- firmed mine. That last volley was a fusillade up in the mission itself. With a little cry I broke into a run toward the river, and I ran now more frantically than when I had expected a trooper's lance between my shoulders at each next step. At the underbrush 376 THE LONE STAR Buckalew caught up with me, and gripped me by the arm. "Wait!" he panted. "Now, down on your knees, and crawl." At the water's edge, behind a screen of reeds, he stopped me definitely. On the other side the Mexicans were throwing the corpses of the murdered volunteers into the dry brush, and setting them on fire. They had chosen this spot for the massacre because the brush was convenient. We drew back, for the smoke drifted over us in a sickening cloud. We thought, too, that we heard groans mid the crackling of flames. "Can you can you say something, Harry?" I caught his meaning. "But I can't," I sobbed. "And they don't don't need any prayer. They " The old man crumpled my hand in his grip. "Shorely, shorely," he muttered. "Heaven don't need any asking for to remember them pore boys. We know, boy, we know. And" his teeth ground and crunched in his head "and we'll not forget 'em either, if if God only gives us the chance!" "But Phil? The others up in the fort? That last shooting, what " "Wait, can't you! We got to wait There, Harry, I ain't meaning to bully; only, for God's sake, boy, don't look like that! We all 'ave reg'larly got to take what's sent Now look there, what's those carts lumbering down this here way from the town for, and what's all that crowd?" He meant only to turn my crazed thoughts, but as the throng and carts drew nearer, they held our gaze. Soldiers prodded the oxen, the townspeople surrounded them with bulging eyes, and the carts, where we hoped to see our wounded volunteers decently transported, were THE GOLIAD MATINS 377 piled high with some formless, inert cargo. Nearer yet, and now in the river road just opposite, we perceived that each conglomerate mass was a heap of dead bodies. Arms and legs dangled over the edges, and sluggish drops were falling between the planks to the ground. Buckalew's fingers circled my arm, and tightened there. The pressure was a silent, imperious command to fortitude, and I think it kept me from turning a gibbering maniac that day. "That woman there," he whispered, "the one totter- ing, and sobbing in her shawl?" I tried to look, but my eyes were blurred, and my brain was on fire. "W'y," he exclaimed, "it's it's Jane Long!" "But she is up at the church, with Phil." The vise on my arm gripped to the bone, and the acute pain steadied my wabbling mind. The carts had ceased their creaking, and the bodies were being tossed out in heaps. "See, that one they're stripping of the brass-button coat, the thieves" I know that Buckalew was using horror as antidote for horror "And we didn't have so many brass buttons but Lord in Heaven, it is Fannin!" Buckalew was right. Weeks afterward we learned how Fannin had been carried from his bed, had been placed in a chair before his executioners. As a matter of course, he died a brave man. "Look, look at Mrs. Long!" I cried. The supreme terrible antidote was failing. "Look, look!" The dear brave lady was dragging a body from the pile of mangled dead, and protesting that that body at least should have burial, and not be burned with the rest. And I knew him, I knew him. I could not mistake his slender form, nor the clean-cut features, when his dear head fell back between his shoulders. I 378 THE LONE STAR knew him though his eyes were closed Mrs. Long had done him that service I knew him though his skin was purple, though a thick, red stain trickled from the corner of his lips. Buckalew's hand quitted my arm and rested gently on my shoulder as I sank face downward in the brush. He waited and stroked my head, awkwardly, tentatively. I think I must have grown rigid. At last he despaired. "Well," he burst forth, "well, and aren't you going to feel bad at all? I'd think you'd feel like crying." Abruptly my whole body relaxed in sobs, and I did cry, for I don't know how long, crying always my brother's name. "There, that's better," the old man muttered over me- CHAPTER XXXVI "THE RUNAWAY SCRAPE" WE LAY among the reeds until night. Across the river the buzzards flapped their wings over the charred and half-burned bodies, impatient of embers still smouldering. The foul birds in their eagerness rasped my nerves, and those other harpies did too, the Mexicans who gorged their curiosity on carrion all day long mid that stench of burned human flesh. The sight crazed me by torturing degrees, and when I could stand it no longer, I would start up, meaning to dart among them and beat them off. But each time Old Man Buck- ale w pinioned me down again. "That's not the way to remember, boy," he groaned. "Wait now, wait, and Sam Houston " Then, seeing me quiet again, or inertly sobbing my brother's name, he would save his breath until the next time. When night came, and he said "Come," I followed him dumbly, crawling through the brushes to the open prairie. For days I had no thought of our movements, of our perils, of our sufferings. Always I was searching, searching, searching to comprehend my grief; telling myself that Phil was dead; then, all over again, striving to grapple the fact, that it might not get away another time. I had no thought of the armed men, now eight hundred all told, lost to Texas through the obstinacy of the Council, nor of the fearful score in this that I now had to settle with my manhood. That grew into me afterward, a quiet and a dangerous thing. But for the moment I was only a blind and pliable creature. Anguish 379 380 THE LONE STAR made of me a pulp. I was ever seeing the red stain thickening at the corner of Phil's mouth. What diploma more besplotched than this could any wretch have to the estate of manhood? And later, when that quiet and dangerous thing grew into me. . . . But you shall judge for yourself how it warped the fibres of my soul, and drew taut the heartstrings that had always quivered under the breath of Fear, until you will won- der that they ever again responded even to the touch of Pity. Buckalew led northeastward for Gonzales, hoping to find Houston there. We swam the flooded Guadalupe by means of a log, and came cautiously to the town. But we found no living creature. The cabins that had looked like a handful of oaken dice flung among the trees were only ashy-white scars in the forest. The town was burned off the bosom of the wilderness. We kept on up the river, apparently the only two men left in all Texas, and at my headright league we found blackened log-ends to accentuate the desolation. I hoped that our own men had taken what had vanished, but there were lamentable evidences that the Mexicans had been here too, or even the fraudulent Texan press- masters, who seized stock in the name of our cause and drove it over into Arkansas. I stood among the scat- tered bricks where my hearth had been, where Phil and I had lain on rugs before the luxurious fire, and it was then, I think, that the quiet and dangerous thing first began to grow into me. "They prob'bly run off your niggah, too," said Buck- alew. "Snakes and sticks," he exclaimed, "here's a dead dog, cooked to a cracklin!" The dog was my foxhound, poor old L'fitte. Half burned away, with his head cleft by a sabre, he was lying across what had been my door sill. We buried "THE RUNAWAY SCRAPE" 38! him there, the gallant home guard. As we worked a glad shout startled us, and there was Yappe, on weak tottering legs, running to us from the river bottom. His sunken black face was frantic with joy, and he stammered and cried like a baby as he hugged me, and cried again until I thought his heart would break when I told him of Phil. "An' wha' yo' po' ma say?" he moaned. "An' po' ol' Mah's too; yas, an' him too?" "Where have you been?" I asked. "How'd you escape?" "Bin hidin' out'n de timbuh, fo' daiys an' daiys. Ye-yeah sah, fo' daiys an' daiys, evuh sence we done know 'bout de Al'tno, an' how de Mesk'uns was comin' dis heah way." "But why didn't you go on east with everybody else? " Yappe looked at me reproachfully. And he the majordomo? No sir, he jes' stayed, to see what they'd take next. "C'rect," said Buckalew, "but without you think they'll pull up the headright league, there being nothing else left, hadn't you better streak it with us east till we catch up with Houston?" "But don' you go an' tell him, sah, 'bout dem Goliad muhduhs, ur he jes' natch'ly lock you bof up, laik he done two Mesk'uns that fust tole him 'bout de Al'mo. Ev'body am done scairt cl'ar to def, already." The locking up had happened at Gonzales, while Houston was trying to organise three hundred planters who did not even have powder. Houston had hurried from the Convention of all Texas, bringing with him into camp the Declaration of Independence that had just been adopted. He had sent couriers over the country, urging every settler to join him, and he was on the eve of marching to the relief of the Alamo when 382 THE LONE STAR the news came of its fall. He sent Deaf Smith out to verify the report, and Deaf Smith met Mrs. Dickinson and other fugitives who brought Santa Ana's proclama- tion that the rest of Texas should quickly meet the same fate. Then the panic began. The planters, many of them, got leave to hurry to their families and take them out of the path of the horde. A number deserted, and fled eastward, spreading wild tales and turning back those who were hastening forward to volunteer. At Gonzales the widows of those slain in the Alamo had wept and shrieked, and their cries, and the cries of their children, Were heard all night long. Houston sent to the outlying cabins, and had every family brought in, and keeping together what men he could, which was grievously hard to do, he set out on that desperate retreat known as the Runaway Scrape. All his stores were loaded into one wagon, and this wagon was drawn by four decrepit oxen. He had but two cannon, and these he could not take with him. They were sunk in the Guadalupe. The nucleus of his destitute army was outnumbered by the fugitives, by the families that he gathered to him as he went, and his march over the wet prairie through the icy rains was retarded by their carts and wagons. Four scouts were left behind, to watch for the Mexicans and burn the town. All this we patched together out of Yappe's incoherent tale. "And did the Mexicans come?" we asked. Yes, the Mexicans, about a thousand of them, had come from San Antonio only a few days later. They had crossed the Guadalupe, and were jubilantly pursuing Houston toward the Colorado. "Look here, Yappe," demanded Buckalew, "did you see those fugitives, those women, that came from San Antone?" "THE RUNAWAY SCRAPE" 383 "Yassah." "Then do you know if Deaf Smith's wife and my girl Nan were among 'em?" "A Mexican lady," I explained, "and three children, and " "An' was her black eyes jes' a-blazin', an' " "Who, the Mexican lady's?" "No, no, Mah's Harry, de pu'ty young lady wif de buckskin gantlets, an' was they a bulgy-eyed gem'un along too?" "An Englishman?" I cried. "Ye yeah sah, I spec likely." Buckalew glared impatiently over the bleak stretch of the prairie eastward. "Come," he said, "she's with Houston and the rest, and we've got to catch 'em in time for the fight, that is, if if Sam Houston ain't Walloped before now." "Oh no, sah," protested Yappe, "he am' gwine be walloped. I reckon you don' know he's a big gem'un, an' dat he was pow'ful mad." We started on foot, the three of us, and nearly bare- foot at that. The prairie was like a sodden swamp. The northers had blighted the early flowers, and the roads were trodden into a boggy mire first by Houston's stricken band, and next by the pursuing Mexicans. Broken wheels, abandoned carts, dead oxen, pieces of household goods marked their trail. Plantations every- where were given back to the wilderness. Weeds covered ploughed fields, and we saw never a head of stock. But at least the Mexicans could not live off the country. At the Colorado there were signs of fighting, to judge from log breastworks on the east bank of the swollen stream, and graves of Mexicans on the west bank. Yet it could not have been a general engagement. Houston had planned to attack, we learned afterwards, but the news 384 THE LONE STAR had reached him here of Fannin's surrender. The blow was the more heartbreaking, since he had been waiting for Fannin to join him. His wrathful and turbulent men wanted to fight anyway, but they were the only force left now, and Houston took up the Runaway Scrape again, falling back further eastward toward the Brazos. Then the Mexicans made rafts, crossed over, and kept up the chase. In their wake we three, Buck- alew, Yappe and I, trudged as ever through the chill rains. When we reached the Brazos bottoms, it was April already, and the wild rye was growing high under the Jive-oaks. This proved to be salvation for us, for hoofs pounded behind us, and we had only time to jump out of the road and sink into hiding. A gorgeous staff of officers passed us first, and among them was Santa Ana himself, with his favourite, the blithe Colonel Almonte, at his side. It was my turn, now, to grip Old Man Buckalew, and hold him down. Since the Battle on the Medina he had never laid eyes on Santa Ana, but the Mexican's crafty, cruel and vainglorious face was not hard to recognise. The Napoleon of the West was puffed with victory, and he was pushing on to join his advance in the glorious deeds of extermination. His escort, a crack battalion, came on behind at a quick canter, and after them, six or seven hundred of the choicest troops in the Mexican army. The august conqueror had decided to stay a while longer in Texas, and personally tie Sam Houston to his chariot wheel. Perhaps, also, he had a vague glimmering suspicion that the Texans were not quite vanquished as yet. Almonte may have told him so. We had followed them but a short distance when we heard shooting off ahead, in the direction of the river. We made a detour, and came to the Brazos at a point "THE RUNAWAY SCRAPE" 385 north of the town of San Felipe. Then we understood. The Mexicans, just reinforced by Santa Ana, themselves occupied San Felipe, or rather, the blackened ruins of San Felipe, and they were firing at a hundred or more Texans entrenched in the bottoms on the other side. But the Mexicans were not able to cross. The riflemen opposite had cut down trees at the landing, and made themselves a barricade. Now over this barricade there waved a strange and beautiful flag. The flag was quite different from that Constitutional tricolour we had fought under at the Alamo. There was no touch of Mexican green here, but the colours were our own American colours, the red, white, and blue. The blue was a wide perpendicular bar, covering one-third of the flag. The rest of the standard was divided into two horizontal stripes, the top one white, the lower one red. In the centre of the blue field there gleamed a white star, just one lone white star. " Tears to me like a youngish relation to Old Glory," said Buckalew. "I know," I exclaimed. "If the Convention declared us independent, then Texas must be a republic now, and " "Of coh'se, and that's her flag. And ain't she a beauty!" "But how are we to get over to her, that's what I want to know?" "Nothing nearer than Groce's ferry, I reckon, and that's twenty miles upstream." And twenty miles back again on the other side would make forty altogether, and we were starving, and worn down to a rack of bones. We had not gone far, however, before we again leaped out of the trail and hid in the rye. This time a single horseman came up behind us, and that, too, as swift as the wind. But his eyes 386 THE LONE STAR we could not escape. He reined in his fleet clay- bank horse, and drew his pistols, but we were calling to him already. "You're some in a hurry, Deaf Smith," said Buckalew. It seemed the misfortune of men to be always saying the obvious to Deaf Smith, but this time the taciturn old scout only made a grimace, for after all he was glad to see us. Naturally he was in a hurry. General Houston would want to know about the Mexican reinforcements. "Where is General Houston?" we asked. "At Groce's ferry." "But those Texians across from San Felipe?" "The San Felipe militia." "And Nan, Deaf? Where is Nan?" At least this was a natural question, and Deaf Smith charitably expended his breath by jerks. Nan and Mrs. Smith and the little ones, under the especial escort of Gritton, had gone south to Harrisburg on Buffalo Bayou. They had gone there with the Government, which had changed its capital to Harrisburg on the approach of the Mexicans. "The Government?" Of course, the Government of the Republic of Texas, President, Cabinet, et aL, except Secretary of War Rusk and Vice- President Zavala. These two were in camp with Houston. Deaf Smith made us feel that we were not well-grounded in ancient history. Altogether he did not lose two minutes over it, either, and then was gone again like the wind. We followed on foot, but only until we met the men and extra horses he sent back to us from camp. Two hours later we were with the Army of Freedom. The Army of Freedom numbered seven hundred all told, five hundred in camp at Groce's ferry, on the west "THE RUNAWAY SCRAPE" bank of the Brazos, and two hundred more in detach- ments at San Felipe and the other crossings. Though Texas planters, they were mostly new men to me. Only a few, even of the officers, had ever seen service be- fore, and Houston himself had never led an army until now. Against him was Santa Ana, who had fought continuously for twenty years, who had never been defeated. Against the seven hundred Texans, ragged and mostly barefoot, with only old flintlocks, there were seven thousand veterans of Mexico's civil wars. However*, armies of freedom usually do start with a raw, destitute handful. We found the camp in commotion over Deaf Smith's news of the Mexicans concentrating below us. Houston had decided to cross over to the east bank, and his orders were being obeyed with much grumbling. "More o' this scarey back- tracking, eh?" "If Sam Houston calculates on running clean to Arkansas for reinforce- ments, and leave all Texas to the sun-dried Mex'kins, then, well " The Commander-in-Chief was in a fair way of being deposed, right there. A big powerful man in old clothes was tugging at the wheel of a mired can- non. He heard the open muttering, and a vindictive flush overspread his massive features. He straightened angrily, and I recognised General Houston himself. I noticed also that his brows knotted in a twinge of pain, and that his shirt, under the right shoulder, was turning red. It was from the old unhealed wound that he had received while fighting Indians under Andrew Jackson. But the passionate outburst we all expected did not come. Even his solemn childish vanity seemed gone. There was a moment's struggle With himself, and his bearing changed to one of gentle courtesy. "You boys all know," he said cheerily, "that no wave 3 88 THE LONE STAR is going to flow very far uphill, and it can't be long now until this Mexican wave will begin to flow back." "But why uphill, general?" objected a man in a Spanish cloak. This man would have been conspicuous there for the cloak alone, but his voice was saddened, and he spoke with an accent. I remembered him, for he was Don Lorenzo Zavala, once governor of the State of Mexico and now Vice- President of the Republic of Texas. "Yes sir, uphill, sir," Houston replied. "With all deference to exceptions like yourself, Mr. Vice- President, I mean that the invasion is now rolling up against Anglo- American civilisation, and it can't come much farther. Why, Mr. Buckalew," he exclaimed heartily, seeing us for the first time as we stood waiting for a word with him. " Now, now, where are the rest of you Redlanders? I've been looking for them every day, and only eighty have come in so far. Scared of the Indians, eh?" " I left my ranch months ago," said Buckalew. " We're just here from Goliad." "From Goliad?" The word passed excitedly. "Yes, and young Rip too." Houston frowned. "I see young Rip," he said, "and I will speak to him later. But Mr. Buckalew, you were with Fannin, then, when he surrendered? Heavens, man, you don't mean that you gave them your parole?" "Parole?" said Buckalew grimly. "Ducking bullets and swords and lances was more like it." Then he told them of the massacre, and as he did so, the starved haggard faces of the army blanched, and shades of horror and anger came and went, and here and there a man shuddered, and sucked in his breath. "Now we will fight!" they cried. Houston purpled with rage, and the veins at his temples swelled and throbbed. "And by Sant' Ana's "THE RUNAWAY SCRAPE" 389 orders, eh?" he demanded. But suddenly he flung up his arms, and gave vent in his voice of thunder: " 'Say, mighty father ! shall we scourge this pride, And drive from fight the impetuous homicide?' " "Yes, yes!" rang the echo. "And now, general, now!" "And we'll find him," cried Buckalew, "down at San Felipe, this very minute." "Just what Deaf Smith said. Now, general, now!" It was well for us that there was one good military head in Texas. But Houston was sorely tempted, for his wild hot blood was now at boiling, yet he knew that we could not survive a second battle. He must stake all on just the one, and he alone was responsible. "No, no, boys, not quite yet," he said, "Still, you might just keep in mind that ' Jove but prepares to strike the fiercer blow.' Now then, the first thing is to cross the river. Some of you there help me get this sister out of the mud." He meant the mired cannon. She was one of two six-pounders just received from the citizens of Cincin- nati, sent to us as hollow- ware, and christened the Twin Sisters. Until these brass recruits arrived, the Army of Freedom had been an army without artillery. "Hurry up," he called in cheery good nature, "these poor oxen and I can't do all the work. It's only down the bank to the steamboat, you know." The steamboat was a little stern-wheeler that they had found here loading cotton. "And then what?" asked the sullen men. "Then you'll all be captains, as you think you should be." 39 o THE LONE STAR "But do we make the Brazos the dead-line, that's what we want to know?" The Commander-in-Chief bit his lip, yet glanced over them patiently. But a genius of patience would have found it hard to deny this fight-thirsty band. "Well," he said, "we might wait across there a few days longer for the Redlanders, and when they hear of this Goliad business in the States, there'll be thousands of volunteers coming down." "Hadn't we better go up there and get 'em?" sneered one mutinous spirit. " Now that's enough for you, sir! " thundered Houston. "Put your shoulder to that wheel. At once, I say!" The man obeyed, yet only because he was a good patriot. "Depend on it, gentleman," Houston reassured them, "that we are not going any further east." At that they all sprang willingly to break camp, and we made our new camp across the river. Heavy rains had turned the bottoms into a marsh, and water sur- rounded us on all sides. There was not a single tent, and yet we had to rig up a hospital on account of the measles having broken out among us. We killed what beeves we could find, and ate the meat without salt or bread. We cut up horseshoes and old iron and tied the pieces in bags for canister. But at least we did have the strange flag with the lone white star, and that flag was our army's equipment. For a week we camped here at Groce's Retreat, as the plantation was called, and still the volunteers from the eastern settlements never arrived. But vigilant Deaf Smith, the omniscience and very providence of the campaign, brought in startling news. Santa Ana had captured a boat somewhere below San Felipe, and with a thousand of his choicest troops, had crossed the river. "THE RUNAWAY SCRAPE" 391 "Then," said Houston, grandiloquently, consolingly, "he is treading the soil on which he is to be conquered." Santa Ana, however, was not worrying about that. He would come back at his leisure and smoke us out, but for the present he and his thousand men were hurry- ing south to surprise and hang the Texan Government at Harrisburg. I thought at once of Gritton, because Gritton was at Harrisburg, and no doubt he had kept Santa Ana advised. It was imperative, now, that I should reveal the spy's true character to our general. Houston had not favoured me as yet with that talk which he had threatened under his ominous frown, but incidentally I gave him the opportunity now. I found him at his headquarters, which means that he was sitting straddle of a log, with each foot on a little pile of bark to keep them off the wet ground. His old black coat was buttoned with collar turned up, and his old white hat Was pulled down over his eyes. He was writing a despatch, using the log for a table. The despatch was in reply to a taunting letter of criticism from the acting- secretary of war. I told him my whole story of the felon Gritton, of Gritton's revelations at the fandango, even of his note to me in the Alamo. I had to tell it all, in order that Houston might be warned and prevent other disasters to Texas through this man's villainy. I knew that I could trust to his honour to forget Nan's name in the matter. "But you have no proofs," he said dryly. "You don't believe me, then?" "I do, though, every word, and I will send Deaf Smith to Harrisburg at once to take your friend Gritton before Sant' Ana can arrive there. This scaly serpent that we have warmed at our bosom shall do us no more harm, but what of his deserts, sir, what of his deserts? I can't shoot him without proof." 392 THE LONE STAR But I did not want Gritton shot, for I should never be able to convince myself that I had not wanted it on personal grounds. "I see now," said Houston, "that I have been mis- taken as to yourself. You did deliver my orders to Travis and Bowie, to ' those chiefs of race divine,' it seems?" For reply I handed him those same orders, indorsed with the signatures of Travis and Bowie. "There now, young Rip," said Houston, "I'm sorry for my first ill-humour toward you, but I always thought Travis didn't get my orders." "That's all right, sir, but when do we fight Santa Ana?" "You see we are getting ready to march at once." "But where, sir?" "Oh, what an army! Not a man jack will take a step until he knows where to." "And not then, sir, if it's any direction but south." "Almighty particular we are as to the compass, lately." "But Santa Ana thinks we're afraid of him." " What of it? Perhaps I have planned that he should. When a general can dictate even his adversary's thoughts, then he can dictate the campaign on both sides. Well?" Well, he had manipulated the whole thing superbly. He had inveigled Santa Ana into a race to catch him, and the eager Santa Ana had left his main armies on the road, to build rafts at the Colorado for wagons and artillery. And now, rash and overconfident, Santa Ana had even divided his advance forces, and was now lured to our side of the Brazos with only a thousand "THE RUNAWAY SCRAPE" 393 men. I opened my eyes in wonder over Houston's magnificent craft. It "was like Napoleon's One Hundred Days over again. But the finest of all was his courage to play the runaway Fabius. With never a council of war, but alone responsible, he left to desolation and the enemy all our settlements from the Colorado to the Brazos, though the settlements were largely the homes of the very men in his ranks. And that he had held these men together, there was the miracle. But they had taken, now, the very last step backward. "Might I ask, sir," I said earnestly, "which way we march?" This time he did not resent being questioned. The thirst for battle was deep in his own eyes. "Go and tell that blessed army," he said, "that we march south, that we march for Harrisburg, and that the faster they march, the sooner ' the day shall come, that great avenging day.' Now go, because I must pack yet." He must pack ! His papers and an extra shirt crammed into his saddle wallet, this was his packing. We did not envy him the extra shirt. It was befitting that the Commander-in-Chief of the Republic should have more than the rest of us. CHAPTER XXXVII THE EVE OP SAN JACINTO OUR one fife and drum played valiantly, and we followed the flag of the white star that was no longer strange. Horses and men tugged at the two six-pounders, which mired repeatedly to the hubs. For the rest we might have been a tattered mob, rather than an army. I could appreciate now their sufferings on the dreary march to the Brazos. But there was this change, hope instead of gloom, and that made all the difference in the world. We were " fate, and fierce Achilles, close behind." Houston's inspiring words were ever resounding up and down the column. It was he who got us up in the morning before daylight. It was he, most of all, and foremost, who shunned no martial toil. In only two days and a half, by forced marching, we made nearly sixty miles, and halted on Buffalo Bayou opposite Har- risburg, down in our balmy coast country. The high banks of the narrow, deep bayou were fringed with magnolias, live-oaks, and thickets of gorgeous flowers. And the sun was shining too, at last. Buffalo Bayou flows southeasterly into Gal vest on Bay, and we were on the north bank. Opposite, we saw Harrisburg, but Harrisburg in ruins. Santa Ana had been there already, as we learned from Deaf Smith. But the Government had escaped, and Santa Ana had pursued on south to the coast, in time to see the Govern- ment pushing off in a sailboat for Galveston Island. 394 THE EVE OF SAN JACINTO 395 "Now we have got him!" shouted the Army of Free- dom. Certain unalterable little matters of Geography dawned on them. Santa Ana could go no further south, because of the bay. Going there, he had crossed Vince's bridge over Vince's Bayou, which flowed into Buffalo Bayou. He would have to come back over this bridge to strike either north or west. On the east the Buffalo Bayou cut him off, except at a ferry below its junction with the San Jacinto, almost where it empties into the bay. We would have to cross Buffalo Bayou then, fol- low it down stream, and get to the ferry ahead of Santa Ana. We set to work building rafts. As soon as Deaf Smith had finished his reports, Buck- alew questioned him about Nan, and I about Gritton. The scout's leathery old face clouded. His wife and Nan and some other women folks had vanished from Harrisburg before Santa Ana arrived, even before the Government left, and Deaf Smith could not learn where they had gone. The same was true of Gritton. But I was not surprised. Gritton knew that Santa Ana was coming, and of course he had taken Nan and her com- panion to a place of safety. Yet I felt that he had not gone far. Gritton would still want to serve his master by keeping him advised of our movements. Buffalo Bayou was running banks full, and it took us all the next day to cross. We had to leave behind a number of our men who were sick with the measles; and with only an ammunition wagon, the Twin Sisters, and rations for three days, we marched until one o'clock in the morning. By that time we were falling in our tracks, and Houston reluctantly ordered a halt. We dropped on the prairie as we were, and slept. At dawn a muffled drum tap roused us. We were cooking meat on sticks when our scouts came in with word that they had surprised some of the enemy at the ferry below, 396 THE LONE STAR and had captured from them a flatboat loaded with plunder. That scout service of ours was the best an army ever had, and Deaf Smith, their chief, was peerless. He had waylaid Santa Ana's courier, despatches and all, and we learned from them everything we wanted to know. We learned that Santa Ana had turned east- ward, and was marching toward the ferry. We dropped our chunks of beef in the fire, and we never stopped until we got to that ferry, several hours later. The uncon- quered Napoleon of the West was nowhere in sight. We had beaten him to it, and we made camp in the grove of live-oaks fringing the bank. Houston mused aloud: " 'Just there the impetuous homicide shall stand, There cease his battle, and there feel our hand.' " Our grove of live-oaks conveniently hid us from the prairie that stretched in front of us westward, and across this prairie Santa Ana must march toward us to reach the bayou. The bayou, though, was back of us, and we were therefore between him and the ferry. Vince's bridge lay to the north, and the bay, flanked by a marsh, lay to the south. There was some timber on the edge of the marsh, and several mottes on the prairie. The latter were only a hundred yards or so from our grove, and we promised ourselves that they would come in handy. Altogether it was a very desir- able and very compact battle field ; provided, of course, we did not have to retreat into the bayou. "Here they come!" cried a lookout from a treetop. An officer cursed up at him. "Shut up, will you!" Houston's aide, our chief of ordnance, had the Twin Sisters wheeled to the edge of the grove. "Why the devil don't they hurry?" men grumbled around me. Their fists were clenching and opening. THE EVE OF SAN JACINTO 397 Two miles across the prairie, like the shadow of a cloud, the Mexicans were coming. They straggled toward us irregularly, suspecting nothing. I made out their black-glazed fighting caps, and remembered the waves that had swept up the walls of the Alamo. I remem- bered the line of pointed muskets we had faced at Goliad. There were cavalry, too, cavalry with lances, and I remembered Goliad again. I looked around me and saw those fists clenching and opening. I felt better then. One of our gunners lighted a match. "Damn you, no, not yet!" cried Houston. But the man had fired the gun already. The Mexicans halted, and stared at our grove in consternation. A striking figure on a white horse was knocking men right and left to get to the rear. He was in a frantic state, so I knew he must be Santa Ana. Directly they began to advance warily, and sent ahead a long twelve-pounder, the only cannon they had, and a skirmish line of infantry. The Twin Sisters sprinkled them with scrap iron, and they gave way. "Let's shoo 'em clear back!" yelled one of our colonels, a young Kentuckian named Sydney Sherman. This Colonel Sherman went to Houston with his plan, and Houston consented. Sherman was to keep out of musket range, and to reconnoitre only. The Mexicans were fortifying about a mile in front of us, and Houston wished to learn more of their position. Sherman agreed, and called for as many volunteers as we had horses, which were not eighty altogether. I was so fortunate as to be one of those chosen. Now it happened that we did get under fire, all right. The Mexicans, first infantry, then cavalry, ninety strong, attended to that, and I have an idea that Sherman was not adverse, either. The conflict was really a pretty one, they with their cannon showering grape on us and a line of infantry 398 THE LONE STAR trying to cut us off, and we driving their ninety cavalry- men back on their cannon. Our own infantry had to deploy to help us draw off without bringing on a general engagement, and this we did, though very reluctantly, and only after orders were imperative and profane. So ended the matter for that day, but I have yet something to add, not only because it concerned my actions the next day of the battle, but also in that it affected my whole subsequent career. This began with so trivial a thing as the glances toward me of my com- rades. During the skirmish we were charging and lung- ing and parrying at so terrific a rate, and I was so busy myself, that I could not suppose that any of us had time to notice the others. Yet afterward in camp, when the thing grew more pointed, I remembered that their glances my vay had begun in the heat of battle, and that even then they had made me uneasy, as though I were something queer and uncanny. If a man looked at me in that bloody half-hour, he was certain to look again, but with always a sort of averted gaze. Even Colonel Sherman himself caught the mania, and after that I felt his eyes also on me, tense and puzzled. Yet I was doing no more than slaying my fellow-men, like the rest of them. Then, when we were back in camp, they hovered around me diffidently, as though around an object fascinating and repellent at the same time. My imagination and sensitiveness exaggerate this, no doubt, yet I was certainly not craving frank comrade- ship just then, nor anything except that we crush like jelly-fish the monstrous assassins who had come against us. But nevertheless I could not help but sense their talking apart among themselves, and hastily looking away whenever I passed near. I saw Sherman making his report to Houston beside the general's camp-fire, and even these two were talking in whispers like the THE EVE OF SAN JACINTO 399 others. Sherman raised his head and saw me. Then Houston did too, and it was certainly an odd trick of the imagination if there was not a shadow of the identical expression on Houston's face. I swung angrily on my heel, to get away by myself, but Houston called me. I went, and Sherman drew apart with some others of the late charge, and they stood and waited in an oppressing silence. Houston's brow knitted between his eyes into something Jove-like. That look of his was keen and searching, and as he grew satisfied, there was less and less favour in his look. What had I done? What could I have done? But my jaws were locked, and as I held his gaze waiting for the accusation, the look in my eyes must have been as hard as the steel in my own soul. "Mr. Ripley," he spoke brusquely, as though forced to it by duty, "Mr. Ripley, you will lead the cavalry to-morrow." My jaw dropped, and I stared at him. "I have just learned," he explained sharply, "that General Cos has joined the enemy with five or six hun- dred more men. That makes sixteen hundred to our seven hundred. Now, by the Almighty, we must use whatever instrument that comes to our hand. Lucifer himself were here, I would use him. But Mr. Sherman just tells me Sherman regularly commands in the infantry, you know he just tells me that if want a a demo*r-to lead the cavalry, that you are the man." "I I don't want to lead the cavalry," I replied. "Ha, perhaps, soul of battles, you want the army then?" "Nothing, sir, nor anyone." "Why not, sir?" 400 THE LONE STAR "Because there's too much at stake to stake any of it on me. We've got to win." " But it's for that hell-bent spirit of yours that I'm ask- ing you. You'll lead those boys to-morrow, sir, because I know you would lead them plum' into Hades, if neces- sary. Refuse, and by the Lord Harry, I'll have you court-martialled and shot at once. Do you understand ? " "Not under a threat, sir." "Anyway you like. Blot out the threat. Do you understand?" "I never meant disobedience. I do protest, though, against the wisdom of it." " Bah! Protest overruled. From now on the cavalry reports to you as colonel." "Very well, sir. When do you call a council of war?" "Have I had the habit of calling any, sir?" "No, sir. But you might consider this " Never mind what I might consider But what is it? " "That the bridge over Vince's is the only road to escape out of here." "For us, yes." "For them too, sir. Why not cut Vince's bridge?" " Pluto's shades of the damned, but you are a demon! " "And then no more reinforcements could reach them," I urged. "True enough, but that's not the real thing on your mind. You're thinking of sixteen hundred singed wildcats in a cage, and no getting out." "And Santa Ana among them. He will be the first to run for Vince's bridge." "What, the great earth-shaker himself? 'Too mean to fall by martial power,' eh? Ah, gentlemen, ' The feeble props of human trust," THE EVE OF SAN JACINTO 401 as for instance," he added, "that bridge at Vince's. You do not know, Colonel Ripley, that Deaf Smith has his orders to chop down that particular prop." "Now it looks," I replied, "as if there might be other demons in camp." "And you may go with him, if you like." "Thank you, sir. I will, with pleasure." Armed with axes, and to the teeth besides, we mounted and set out, Deaf Smith and six of his hardy company of scouts, and myself. We passed within gunshot of the Mexican camp, and took the road to Harrisburg along the Buffalo Bayou for eight miles. Here we came to Vince's plantation. There were lights in his old double log-house, but we circled clear of it, lest there should be Mexicans there. Then, around to the road again, with the Spanish moss brushing our cheeks, we gained the bridge itself. The bridge was of huge, rough cedar, a homely structure enough on which to hinge the destiny of a republic. The scouts took their axes, and began chopping the heavy timbers. A stone's throw away, off the road under the live-oaks, I stood guard with the horses. The blows of chopping echoed dully, but to me they sounded as though they must rouse the Mexican camp eight miles distant. After a time I heard, or thought I heard, swift footfalls. Then a fleet shadow sped past me up the road toward the house. The vague rush through the dark offered no target, and I could not tell, at first, but that the man was one of our scouts returning from the bridge. There was nothing except to drop the halters of our horses and give chase. The man was too far ahead to hear me, nor did I even eee him until he reached the house, where he flung open the door, entered through a yellow flood of light, and slammed the door to again, approached cautiously, and reconnoitred. A window 402 THE LONE STAR of the room was open, and I looked in, and there was my man sitting at a kitchen table with paper and gold- mounted pencil, and dashing off something at a furious rate. Yet even as he wrote, he stroked his inverted harp of a moustache. For all his alert haste, he looked lazy, stupid as ever, as dense as lead, yet to cut, as hard as a diamond. Now Gritton meant to warn Santa Ana about our destroying the bridge. This much was easy to guess. Yet, quite as evidently, he did not intend to go himself; which was because he did not want to betray his whereabouts to Santa Ana. And why? Why, unless his whereabouts were also Nan's? Then Nan herself, leaving the others in another part of the house, appeared here in the kitchen. The tan was in her cheeks still, but there was only a hint of the roses left. Nan was in a stress of mind, and the stress had dated from weeks past, evidently. Her black eyes lighted as she saw him there writing. She passed behind him casually, but in the action darted a quick, hungry look at the paper. He shifted his shoulder between her and the paper, and smiled languidly. "To our people, I imagine?" she said. He folded the paper, and glanced up indolently out of his bulging eyes. "Quite-ah probably," he replied. "You told me our people were nowhere near here yet. But I heard shooting this afternoon." " Re-ahly now, Miss Buckalew ? You have good ears." He paused, listening, and the blows of chopping came very faintly. "Ah yes, they may be very near. For that reason I am writing." "For what reason, Mr. Gritton?" "Your friends, and the friends of this houseful of Women, they would like to know you are here." "Let me see." She held out her hand for the paper. THE EVE OF SAN JACINTO 403 "Dee-uh me, but there are military affairs here too, and they are not-ah affairs for young ladies. This means though," he added, with a slight tightening of his drooping mouth, "the last stroke in the acquirement of a-ah princely competence for your humble ser- vitor. And then " "I congratulate you, Mr. Gritton, but really, my concern for your private affairs is not such " "Not even if there's a-ah title in England, in- volved?" Her lip curled frankly. She did not pretend to mis- understand his meaning. I could hear the dull blows of axes. If Deaf Smith would only hurry, and come! "To be sure, a title," he repeated. "'Sir' and 'Lady,' y' know." He rose, but seemingly he was as anxious to stay and have it out with her, as to get away and deliver the paper to some messenger in waiting outside. For her own part, she was as anxious to detain him and that paper, even though she did have to hear him to the end. "Let me see it," she repeated. "Think, a title." She reached for the paper. " And-ah myself." She laughed, but there was never more bitterness in mirth. His puffy lower lip hung incredulously. "You you have laughed all along?" he stammered. There was a dent in his shell, after all. "Why, of course!" "And you never once " "Oh oh! It was-ah too preposterous, y f know," and she looked at him as at a curious specimen. I think she even made the gesture of taking a pinch of snuff. "Too preposterous, y' know, even if I haven't seen 4o 4 THE LONE STAR pretty clearly, Mr. Gritton, that you are that you are a spy." I hoped now that Deaf Smith and his men would take their time. The Englishman had been groping ludicrously for an explanation of the girl's incomprehensible and stupefy- ing aversion. Now, in her accusation, he thought he understood. "You have suspected, then," he ventured, "that I am-ah employed by Sant' Ana?" "Oh, are you?" Her feigned surprise was magnificent. "For which, only to-morrow, I receive the the pay of an army. And I might add that I have worked so hard for-ah, your sake, y'know." Her manner grew dangerous, "I wish you would not mention it," she said. His drooping sandy lashes lifted. "Even," he drawled, "even if on the other hand I have repeatedly risked this-ah splendid sum on account of you?" She tapped her foot impatiently. But at least he Was being detained. "The first time," he went on evenly, "was precisely the first time I saw you. It was then that I saved your father, though I had been on his trail for weeks. He Was, y' know, on the proscribed list." "Thank you, sir." "And then," said Gritton, giving his moustache a jerk, "your father took Goliad from us." "And you were so sorry that I neglected to tell you of his intentions. But Harry Harry knew that he was coming, and helped him and the others take Goliad." "Ah, to be sure, a brilliant lad, Harry. I could always count on him to play into my hands. There at Goliad, for example, when I inspired that-ah inventory visit on Mrs. Long, you remember. I meant to force THE EVE OF SAN JACINTO 405 you and Auntie Jane to leave, under-ah my escort. But it was our late friend Harry who proposed it, who urged it, and generously stayed behind." "After which," mused Nan, "you blundered across the Mexicans, and they took us to San Antone." "Also deep calculation," said Gritton. "After the Texians should give up the siege, the Mexicans would take us to Mexico." "But the Texians did not give up the siege." "And that is where I risked my princely competence, and my neck too, for you. Fearing that Cos would hold you as a hostage for your father, I induced the Texians to assault the town. So I lost the town for Sant' Ana, that you might be rescued." "Thank you again, this time for the Texians. But your brazen confession, sir Of course, after you win the final victory for the Mexicans to-morrow, and can join them openly, you may be proud to have people know the detestable character of your genius But your confession, oh, what light does it throw on Harry's poor wild story of your note to him in the Alamo!" "Rather a clever stroke of mine, don't you think?" But there were tears, not admiration, in Nan's eyes. " I called him back, there at Seguin's," she murmured. "And yet I let him go. You say he went to Goliad?" "Where the-ah worms have had him long since." She dropped into the chair he had left, and buried her face in her hands. One shudder after another passed over her. Gritton, with feet apart, stroked his mous- tache and watched her. Yet there was a furrow of impatience between his lazy eyes. "Oh I say now, Miss Buckalew, why all this-ah- adoration? It's only-ah-posthumous, y' know, espe- cially as you chose quite differently while he was stil living. For example " 406 THE LONE STAR Nan raised a pair of moist, wide-open eyes, and gazed at him wonderingly. " for example, the night the Texians rescued us in San Antonio, and there was but one seat left in the carriage beside you. You remember his-ah unpro- voked assault on me as I was about to take that seat? You called to him. He released me. And I took the seat. Was not that an indication of your-ah choice?" "Oh oh!" Nan gasped in amazement. Deaf Smith might take his time. I wanted to hear more of this. "Now I say the deuce," said Gritton. "But it was an indication, y' know." "Oh, what stupidity!" cried Nan, "And couldn't you see that I was always trying to goad Harry into asserting himself? Each time he endured a rebuff from you Oh, how I hated you! you remember I said, 'Another time, Harry.' But how could I know that I Was playing with fire? How could I know that that kind of a man is the most dangerous? But I learned. I learned that night you speak of, when my taunts had their effect, and he caught you by the throat there at the carriage door as if you were a snarling cur." The furrow in Gritton 's brow deepened. "Then why did you stop him?" "Because there came over his face the most awful change, and I was frightened, though not," she added concisely, "not on your account, sir. His had always been a face that I I Well, no matter, but I could not bear to see it changing before my eyes into that hard, murderous one, and I cried out to him. Yet wasn't I astounded, though, that just a word from me should bring him back to his old self! But when he fell back so ashamed, and let you take the seat, I never was so THE EVE OF SAN JACINTO 407 angry at him in all my life. Now, Mr. Gritton, can you still believe that I meant the seat for you?" Merciful Heaven, if girls are not incomprehensible I To think that I was resolving to get myself killed that night because she wanted the seat for Gritton! "And," Nan went on sadly, "when we rode away, and he stood there looking after us, as docile and hurt as a poor scolded collie, I think I called to him, 'An- other time, Harry.' " "Which," said Gritton with a yawn, "will never come, y' know. Though for my desire of surcease from- ah ennui, I regret that the encounter can never I say, y' know, I'm deuced sorry, for now you will go on thinking that our young friend would have redeemed himself, and against-ah your humble servitor. But there, that's past, and my real business to-night He pulled on his hat, and started for the door. But she was there before him, as I discovered as I myself threw open the door and entered. I had to brush her to one side, when I should have had my pistol ready, and in doing that, I exposed my body to Gritton. He fired, and there was a sharp explosive sting through my head, which reminded me dazedly of a jumping tooth- ache. But the need to get that paper was opiate enough. I knew that the room had filled with excited women and children at the report, but I knew nothing else until Gritton was bent backward over the table, and the pink floridity of his skin was going purple under my fingers at his throat. "Now you may drop that paper." My words hissed thickly, or rather gurgled, through a mouth full of blood. "Drop it, or I'll kill you." But Gritton would have died, I think, still clutching the paper. 408 THE LONE STAR "I'll I'll slap you," I said blindly, knowing only that I could not kill him. "Across the mouth," I added, and drew back my hand. "Quick, drop it!" And then, his fist did open, and the crumpled note rolled out on the table. "Read it, Nan," I said. The girl had been hopping up and down, and wring- ing her hands in an anguish to help. She had seized the note already. She read aloud: " S. A., per courier. Vince's bridge destroyed. Advise repairing at once, if you expect reinforcements. G." .* "What I thought," I said. "Now tear it up." "But why, Harry? Why?" "Because it will mean hanging. Don't you see, it's the proof." "Then I'll jus' take it," and there was Deaf Smith himself and his scouts. He closed his hand over Nan's even as she tore the note once across. Deaf Smith wrenched it from her. " 'Nough yet for hanging," he said. Gritton's shot had brought them to me, and now they took the spy in charge. Nan herself did the same by me. Blood was gushing from my mouth and left cheek, soaking my shirt to the skin. Gritton's bullet had plowed through my front teeth and out again through the cheek. "It's all right, Nan," I sputtered. But with her hands on my shoulders, she pushed me into a chair. She made the other women bring a basin of water and tear a skirt into bandages. The hemor- rhage seemed about finished, and I tried to rise. "Oh, the obstinacy of him! " she cried. Then bending to my ear, she whispered, "Listen, you remember last THE EVE OF SAN JACINTO 409 Christmas in San Antone, when we all had dinner at Deaf Smith's?" "What's that got to do with this?" "And you were having so much trouble telling me good-bye?" "What in the world " "And Phil wanted to help you?" At my brother's name I jumped up. She gave a little cry as she looked on my face, and it was around my neck this time that she flung her arms. "Wait, wait," she murmured. "You remember that Phil whispered something to me just before he left us together, and you wanted to know what it was?" "Well? But hurry, Nan, I can't " "He whispered, 'Be good to Harry. Can't you see how it is with him, sis sister mine ? ' And then Phil he rode away." I put her arms down, and started for the door. "And and," she cried piteously behind me, "I do want to be good to you, Harry." I turned to Deaf Smith. "We must go," I said. "I lead the cavalry into hell." "His orders, miss," explained one of the scouts. "So it's good-bye, Nan," I said. I never looked for life beyond the next day's battle. We returned speedily to camp, and reported. Deaf Smith turned Gritton the spy over to General Houston, which is all that I shall have to say about Gritton. CHAPTER XXXVIII "ONB ILLUSTRIOUS DAY" EVEN sleeping that night, on the eve of battle, was a desperate business. We could not hope for one additional man, and therefore all reinforcement must come from within ourselves. Accordingly, with double guards set and frequently changed, we ate and we slept, to win back what we had lost during two days without eating and sleeping. The precious hours of bivouac, there under the live-oaks, with moss for pillows, meant a redoubling of fighting strength. Then there was the lesson of the Alamo, that terrible sacrifice that might now be utilised. I had learned in the Alamo the desperate effectiveness of few numbers, when every man spends himself to the last breath. I, the only survivor, hoped to make that lesson avail us now. Then the Alamo would yet prove the winning of Texas. To enforce the lesson, we had destroyed the bridge. No muscled arm would falter as waste material. There lacked as yet only one thing, that the Mexican bugles should sound "No quarter." Then every Texan would understand, as at the Alamo. The camp was astir early the next morning, and Wanting to know, every man of the seven hundred, when We should begin. And yet the order for attack did not come. Whatever deep design lurked in Houston's head, none of us knew; but waiting any longer, or to gaze across the prairie and see the Mexicans swarming behind their barricade, all this was incentive to mutiny. The grumbling rose louder and louder throughout the camp, 410 " ONE ILLUSTRIOUS DAY " 4 n until the officers themselves, seeing how matters were drifting, went to Houston and suggested a council of war. And for once, Houston consented. We sat around on logs under the live-oak where he had made his headquarters. He had slept here, with a coil of rope under his head. He laid down a mud-bespattered copy of Caesar's "Commentaries," and looked us over affably. "How gentlemen, 'all on fire for fame,' eh? Well, 'war is our business,' so what is it to be?" The question centred down to this: Should we wait any longer on the Mexicans; or should we leave our strong position, and attack? But when it came to the responsibility of deciding, even the most ardent hesi- tated. As Colonel Rusk, the Secretary of War, said: For raw volunteers, with only rifles, and not a bayonet, to charge across the open against veteran, disciplined troops strongly entrenched well, the thing was unpre- cedented in warfare. "Just the same," said Houston, "the raw ones happen to be Texians." And this was the only hint of a decision we could get from him. But I knew that he had decided, some- where in the back of his lion-like head. I knew so from the way he straightened to his towering height, just as he had that day under the cottonwoods in Arkansas, when we had found him a besotted squaw man. He was wrapped in an Indian blanket that time when he received the call of the Texans, and there were feathers in his hair, and the heaving of his great chest was theatric. But the latent blazing in his heavy drunken eyes was prophetic. He had straightened on that occasion in the new-born hope of decency, manhood, leadership, regained. And now, this day on the battle- field, he rose high among us, to win back these things 4 i2 THE LONE STAR by a final blow. I knew his decision as though he had proclaimed it in so many vaulting phrases. We would fight, this much was certain. But how, or when? The shrewd humorous twitch of a smile about his firm mouth left a volume untold. "Rest easy, gentlemen," he said, " ' 'Tis not in words the glorious strife can end.' n and so dismissed us. My confidence that there would be action shortly spread among the turbulent horsemen I was to lead, and we broiled our chunks of beef and ate our dinner in high spirits. Afterward we lay around in the shade, and smoked, and tried to wait. But men were con- stantly going to the edge of the wood to take another look at the Mexican camp, and our grove was as restless as a hive of bees about to swarm. "Ain't scarcely a single movin' human critter over there," said one. " Deader'n they are back in Mex'co after a good feed." "An' this here nice warm April sun, it's shore enough to make 'em drowsy." "An' bein' ez they're so blame sure we're skeered to come nigh 'em, they are jes' " "They're taking a siesta, that's what. Boys, boys, if the good Lord ain't helping us well, I want to know! " This thought began to work, and after that no man could lie still for a minute at a time. "Now's our chance!" "Why'n blazes don't Sam Houston wake up?" The mutiny was smouldering again, and rising, to a white flame. And then, at last, Houston's own orderly was seen running here and there among the live-oaks, hunting out each officer, and panting forth a hurried word. He came to us. "Orders to parade your men," he said. "ONE ILLUSTRIOUS DAY" 413 The troopers sprang to their horses. They began tightening girths. "Parade?" muttered one, too pessimistic to believe. "Can't you understand?" snapped the orderly. "You're to form in in order of battle!" The men smothered their involuntary cheer, and the cheer was low and hoarse, like the first breath of a tor- nado. We of the cavalry leaped to our saddles. "Keep back," I shouted. "Keep back under the trees." On either side of us the infantrymen were darting about in the grove to join their companies, and form in columns. What had seemed a camping party lolling under the trees now assumed the alignments of an army, but of an army pitifully in miniature. None of this might be seen from the prairie, and the grove betrayed no hint that a mon- ster of seven hundred fangs was crouching to spring. Then down the lines rode the Commander-in-Chief, a huge rustic figure on a gaunt war charger. The shabby white hat was thrust back from his leonine coun- tenance, and his velvet vest flapped open breezily. Faded snuff-coloured pantaloons were tucked in rusty, mildewed boots. A ludicrous contrast was his only military insignia, which was a sword in a battered scabbard that dangled by rawhide thongs from his old leather belt. But when he wheeled, facing us, and drew the sword, he looked the stately, lofty breathing barbarian, and needed nothing so little as glittering regimentals. The marks of care and grief were gone from his face, and in the relief of action at last there had come a vast eagerness for fight, a recklessness inspired, and yet a deep and earnest patriotism surcharging each muscle and nerve to endeavour. The "high wisdom, deep design, and art" of the past heart-breaking weeks were now the sword arm only. With a good conscience the splendid viking could at last turn fighter, pure and 4 i4 THE LONE STAR simple. The lust of it quivered through his towering frame. He started to speak: "Now gentlemen of the Army of Freedom, let us not forget that on valour's side the odds of combat lie. ' Now is the hour to conquer, or to fall " "Oh, save the time, general," snorted Old Man Buckalew. "Yes, save the time!" the Texans pleaded. A whimsical light flashed in Houston's eyes. "I'm glad I can," he said. He rode on down the line, stopping only to give orders. He came to us, drawn up between the two infantry wings. I never thought to raise my sword at salute, and he looked me over quizzically. "See," he exclaimed, "' full of Jove, avenging Hector rise! ' But don't you think, most beauteous champion, that you'd look less like a boy with the mumps, and more like a colonel of cavalry about to charge into hell's abyss, if you'd take off that handkerchief tied around your head ? " "Possibly," I said. "I forgot it was there." But the troopers did not smile, and when I bared that hole in my cheek, still raw and trickling blood, even Houston quickly looked another way. I caught his muttered exclamation: "Heaven help them now! ' Dire as the monster, dreadful as the god,' that don't begin to describe him. The boy's possessed." "Your orders, if you please, sir," I said. "I wish you to take position on our extreme right." "And not lead the centre?" protested one of the troopers. " ONE ILLUSTRIOUS DAY " 4I5 "You will be opposed to the Mexican cavalry," said Houston. "Oh, that's different." "And you are to be the first to charge, Mr. Ripley, to draw their attention on yourself. And remember! boys," Houston added, "what old Frederick the Great said about spurs being mightier than the sword. Now go, get along with you!" We broke our formation, cantered within the edge of the grove to the extreme right, and drew up again, facing the prairie. I glanced back along the line, and Houston, like a colossal equestrian statue in advance of the centre, waved his sword to me. I raised forward both spurred heels, and kicked them back into my horse's flanks. "Now! 11 I cried, and we burst upon the open prairie. For almost half the distance we were hidden by a timber motte, but this we circled sharply, and dashed with the rush of thundering hoofs into full view of the Mexican barricade. It was then that we yelled, just yelled. It was more soul-terrifying than any yell ever heard. It was revenge long nursed, and given vent at last. That headlong charge was a superhuman thing. At least I doubt if any human power could have stayed its vim of demons unchained. The Mexi- cans behind their barricade of luggage and under- brush were jumping up and skurrying about in wild panic, while their officers frantically shouted orders. The infantrymen caught up muskets. Gunners sprang to the twelve-pounder, in the centre of the barricade, and gave us a volley. The cavalry leaped astride horses they were leading to water, and came at us pell-mell around the end of their works. We went through them as through a paper hoop. They broke, those who were left, and clattered off toward Vince's bridge. We let 416 THE LONE STAR them go; we could attend to them later. The Mexican bugles sounded "No quarter," and I saw the faces of our troopers harden. "Remember the Alamo!" screamed one man, hurling himself against the barri- cade. "Yes, and Goliad!" yelled a second. The cry grew to a chorus. "Remember Goliad! Remember Goliad!" The blare of Mexican trumpets rose higher. "No quarter!" Then behind us I heard a valiant fife and drum, our fife and drum. They were playing, "Oh, Will You Come to the Bower?" And our fellows back there, charging across the prairie, took up the song derisively: "Will you come to the bower I have shaded for you? " They were coming by leaps and bounds through the high grass, gripping their rifles, their ranks breaking, the whole long line becoming irregular as some outdistanced others, and over the centre waved the flag of the Lone Star. The sun shone on the eager Texan faces, and reddened bared chests and arms. They sang and shouted as they came. Here was the lesson of the Alamo. Willingness to die, here was the basic principle of effectiveness, and I knew in my soul that they, our last armed force, must be irresistible. Houston was galloping up and down in advance of the line. The line ducked to a volley of muskets from the barricade, and men flung rifles to their shoulders. Houston swung his arms wrathfully. I could hear his deep voice bellowing over the tumult, "Damn you, hold your fire!" Whips were cracking, horses plunging, and there was the swift rumbling of wheels. Then, within eighty yards, our two cannon opened up, and bags of canister crashed through the barricade. On the left Sherman and his men gained the woods there, drove the Mexicans out, and came pounding on for the breastworks, now "ONE ILLUSTRIOUS DAY" 41 7 firing when at point blank range, first their rifles, then their pistols, then clubbing both. Deaf Smith on his fleet claybank was in the lead. He rode for the breast- work as for a fence. His horse struck, and over he came headfirst, into the thick of the Mexicans. He swept them back with his sword, and his sword broke. He jerked out his pistol, aimed it at a Mexican who sprang at him with a bayonet. The pistol snapped, and he hurled it in the Mexican's face; then closed in, and wrenched away the bayonet. His scouts were leaping the barricade, kicking over boxes, killing the gunners at the twelve-pounder. Buckalew was among them, a mild old porcupine bristling fire and death. Through another break rode Houston, weathering a hail of bullets, his horse bleeding and staggering. Up and down the barricade, from one end to the other, our men were tumbling over. The affair was henceforth more a brawl than a battle, a free hand-to-hand fight, the most glorious brawl in all the warfare of all the world. All semblance of alignment was lost at the first contact. Officers, orders, tactics, were useless. Each Texan was a captain, as Houston had promised. Better than that, he was a man in a personal fray. When his rifle and pistols were emptied, he used them as clubs, until they broke. Then he unsheathed his bowie knife, and sprayed the brains of the nearest fleeing Mexican; then on to the next, with sweep after sweep of his bared arm. Over all the field every man of the seven hundred was working in the same way, until the high grass was wet as after a shower. They wrenched escopetas from Mexicans who still opposed' them. They caught up loaded rifles stacked about the camp. Then they used the knives again. Altogether it required just about fifteen minutes for 4x8 THE LONE STAR the winning of Texas. The brawl became a chase. The Mexicans went running through their camp, the Texans overtaking them. They toppled over tents, these ragged, barefoot Texans who had none. They trod on camp-fires, knocking down pots where meats were still cooking. They muddied blankets where interrupted monte games were spread. They even stumbled on men in that assassin army hardly yet roused from sleep. On through the camp went the chase, individual killings at every bound. Mexicans fell on their knees, turned to their pursuers, threw up their hands. The sweat was breaking into streams on their yellow faces. ' ' Me no Alamo ! ' ' ' ' Me no Goliad ! ' ' they shrieked. And the Texans over them, with swinging knives: "No Alamo, eh? No Goliad, eh? Go then, go and tell Christ that!" Houston, unhorsed, with a ball through his ankle, limped here and there, trying to stop the slaughter. But the Mexicans were not surrendering. They were running. They rushed into the swamp on the south, and mired there, and Were slain, or taken alive. The puddles of water in the marsh turned reddish. Hundreds fled on to Boggy Bayou behind their camp, and in they plunged, filling the mudhole with floundering bodies. Those crowding after passed over the mass. In a little fringe of timber Colonel Almonte gathered three hundred together, and brought them out, and formally surrendered to ten Texans who happened to be near. And these ten Texans marched the three hundred back to our camp. Of the lancers and dragoons, to say nothing of the Mexicans on foot who headed north, only a few ever reached Vince's Bayou. There they found the bridge gone. We of the horse took after them the moment we saw there was no more need of us on the field itself. We cut them down along the whole course of eight miles, "ONE ILLUSTRIOUS DAY" 4I9 even to the edge of the stream's perpendicular bank. A number of dragoons frantically spurred their horses over the cliff, and we shot them in the water until the bayou was running crimson. Every man of our seven hundred, I know, wanted most of all, fromfirst to last, only to lay eyes on the arch- assassin himself. But that craven soul had taken good care to run in time. My troopers muttered their chagrin as they beat the grass along Vince's, but it was growing dark, and we had to give up the hunt. There was no Santa Ana for us, that day. I may say that we passed near the double log house, and a number of the troopers searched it, but found only Nan and the other Texan women there. I myself did not go near. It never entered my head that now I might see Nan. I did not realise that the battle was over, and that I, who had consigned myself to death, and expected to die, was still alive. But, miraculous or not, as a matter of fact we were all still alive, except two killed on the field and six who later died of their wounds. Of these eight, four were officers. Against a loss of eight men, and possibly thirty wounded, we counted the full number of our little army in Mexicans slain. San Jacinto had evened the score. For each Texan previously killed in battle, or murdered, we had that day taken a Mexican life. As many again we held prisoners, and of these pris- oners, two out of every seven were badly wounded. The total Mexican loss coincided almost to a man, with the entire Mexican force in the field, and this force was double our own. Such a thing is not recorded often in the annals of war, but at least it had happened this once. No one may wonder, then, that when we rode back to camp, we found the tattered Army of Freedom rejoicing 420 THE LONE STAR to the top of their lungs, in the abandon of every con- ceivable devilish antic. They threaded single file among the trees, each man with a lighted candle taken from the Mexican stores. The scene was like an enchanted grove, given over to weird boisterous revelry. Dancing forms joined hands around blazing fires. They flung terrified prisoners into the circle, and sang and hooted and blew deafening blasts of "No quarter" on the enemy's own bugles. They draped Mexican mules in the sashes of Mexican officers. "Sanf Ana! Here's Sant' Ana!" they yelled at each dashing uniform, until the captives tore off their epaulettes. But even so, these assassins at our mercy would not have chosen the Goliad precedent. And even so, we were taking care of their wounded, two hundred and over. The Army of Freedom gathered us of the cavalry to its bosom, and made us one with the riotous jubilance. By us I mean my troopers, not myself. They did in- deed crowd around me in the dark, and those who had let me lead them were the foremost. They started to hail my name, to slap me on the back, to throw their arms around me, but something checked the impulse and hushed their rough enthusiasm. They had a quick second thought, and drew apart. They seemed to remember their feeling of queerness in aught that con- cerned me, and left me to myself, though hovering near with their first impulse still on them. I knew the sting of it now, though I had not before. But now I would have given a great deal to be slapped on the back. In- tead I was alone, and when Yappe came, I went with him to the little camp-fire he had ready for me, and flung myself on the grass. Here Deaf Smith found me, and pushed his way through my men who stood awk- wardly about. I jumped up and took his hand. Then came Old Man Buckalew, and there was his hand too. 431 He turned me round so that the fire lighted my face, and he beamed up at me through his tortoise-shell specs. His expression changed, and yet not as I had come to dread in all men who looked at me. " W'y, young Rip Harry 1" he cried. " W'y, what's the matter, boy? You're changed. You've gone all to pieces. You're dripping tears all down your cheeks. Bless my heart, if you ain't crying I" And I suppose I was. The quiet, dangerous, ugly thing had gone out of me entirely. Oh, it had all been so cruel, so needless, on both sides! The troopers gathered nearer. By the light of the fire they stared at me in wonder, and their eyes grew big and round. Well, no doubt 1 was a soft specimen, and it must have been difficult for them to place the uncanny demon who had led them into Hell. Then their expressions began to change too, just as Buckalew's had. One let forth a joyous shout. Another's open palm crashed between my shoulders. The whole camp seemed to be running toward us. They shoved and jostled, and gave their impulses free leave. I might have been just a pet of the regiment, a luck? mascot. But my heartstrings were all pulling and tugging, and I was swallowing the tears thick and fast. I protested, squirmed, and was immeasurably embarrassed, but whether or no, they hoisted me in air, and I felt myself tossing on a sea of upstretched hands, and being passed along over their heads. It was as though they had loved me very dearly in years gone by, and had just found me again. "To Sam Houston with him!" The shout rose above the storm of yells. "To Sam Houston with Colonel Rip. To Sam Houston with him!" Well, that jaw of mine went softening like a babe's, and quivering like a mound of jelly. And a sorry sight 4 aa, ' THE LONE STAR 1 must have been as they dropped me on my feet under the live-oak of the Commander-in-Chief. Houston lay on the ground, stretched on a blanket, with one dilapi- dated boot cut off, and the leg swollen and bandaged to the knee. But he was breathing deep, and his splendid eyes were ablaze with happiness. That day he had won back his place among men. He was all kindness as he saw my state, and his manner, as he reached forth his hand, was whole-souled and hearty. He smiled and nodded at the cheering, and the grip of his ringers set my heart to pounding like a thousand cannon. "If you please, general," I said, "I've come that K, I would have come to resign." Protests dinned in my ears, and Houston looked at ne blankly. "At least," r said, "I take it that there 's no longer any orders to bind me." "No, but why the devil must you resign, sir?" "I'm just, just sick, You know, when a man gets back from from Hell, he's liable to feel that way." "Now, by the god of battles, what a notion!" "And I want no more of it unless unless I have to, Besides, sir, I'm not fitted." His cheeks puffed, and then he exploded. "But you can't live this thing down," he cried, "They're bound to make you something. Jove, they'll make you " "But after you, general, after you," they yelled, "We want you first, and then comes Colonel Rip." The blood in my cheeks pricked like needles, but if they meant statesmanship, I thought how shabbily I had proved in that too. "No, no," I said. "I'm not fitted there either." "Which," observed Houston, " will set Fate staggering " ONE ILLUSTRIOUS DAY " 423 to match irony, for it will be the irony of the people's choice." "And we'll risk it," shouted a trooper. "See there," said Houston. "At any rate," I demanded, "you accept my resigna- tion? I should like to go back to my headlight league," I added, and I was thinking of Nan too, "that is, of course, provided the Republic thinks I have earned a headright league." "No doubt about that, and fifty of them," Houston replied, "only, none of us have quite proved title yet." " But this victory to-day, sir, doesn't that prove "Let us hope so, but we haven't cornered Sant' Ana yet. If we had Well, we haven't though, since 'the great ^Eneas fled too fast.' There's still four or five thousand more Mexicans in Texas, and so we'll need every "Then of course I'll stay, sir. But Mr. Buckalew and a few others of us want to get leave for to-night and to-morrow." "Well, write the permits yourself." "About Santa Ana now, would his capture end this thing?" "Most certainly. He would order the balance of his armies out of Texas. Why do you ask? What " "Nothing, exactly. But Mr. Buckalew wishes to see his daughter, and as she's at Vince's, and as the few Mexicans we haven't taken yet no doubt ran that way, why, just perhaps " "I see, just perhaps. But I have given orders scour all that country in the morning." "Still, we are going to-night, sir." "I see again," said Houston, smiling. "And she s 4 2 4 THE LONE STAR a marvellous little Redlander girl, too. Oh, I remember her, quite well. But at the time, Colonel, you seemed rather afraid of her, eh?" "I am only going to show her father the place," I replied. "Oh, I see!" exclaimed Houston. "Jove, it's re- markable how much I do see, to-night." CHAPTER XXXIX CONCLUSION VTT E STARTED for Vince's as soon as I left General Houston. Our party incuded Buckalew, Deaf Smith, three or four scouts, Yappe, and myself, all of us mounted. Half-way there we saw a lantern bobbing toward us along the dark road, and a little nearer, a clear, sparkling voice challenged us out of the night. The voice was Nan's. She was on foot, with only Deaf Smith's wife and several others of the women whom she had persuaded to come. She had seen the terrified Mexicans fleeing past Vince's house, and deciding that we had won a victory, she could wait no longer. At once she was in her father's arms, and making sure that he was uninjured. "And you, Harry? And you?" she questioned, and as on another occasion she stretched a hand to me across the old man's shoulder. "Here, Daddy, that's enough. Let me have that lantern." She took the lantern, and held it to my face. I was glad of the light, that I might see her; and I saw now what I had no eyes for the evening before, such as the beauty of her face wreathed so alluringly in the black lace of her mantilla. It was the same tender, ravishing vision that had appeared behind the bars of a window, and had halted me that night in the streets of San Antonio. And as later, at the fandango, here was the petite queenliness and independence of her slender figure crowned by the high Spanish comb, which hoisted up the mantilla in a particularly disconcerting and rakish 4*5 426 THE LONE STAR manner. She gave me one quick, anxious look, and once again I heard her voice in that sweetest timbre, as of an angel leaning over the parapet of Heaven. "Oh, oh," she half sobbed, "that poor cheek is bleed- ing yet. We must hurry back to the house. But hurry only hurry, dear." The last word just slipped out, I know. But out it came so naturally, as though she had always thought of me so, that I bore up under it as the most natural thing in the world, despite the thrill that went through me. "All right," I said, thinking I might as well exact terms, "but if you will let me lift you on my horse." "No, no, you cannot walk." "In front of me, I meant." "Oh!" And yet that is the way we arranged it. Of course, one of us might have taken Yappe's horse, but we did not happen to think of that. Back at Vince's there was once more Nan's basin of cool water, and the tearing of bandages, and the bathing of that cheek of mine, where the hole was like the red ghastly eye of a Cyclop. As Nan leaned over me, work- ing busily and her face was very close to mine I ventured an uneasy glance toward Nan's father. I could sense the bristling of the porcupine, the gathering of the crabbed storm. As yet, though, sheer bewilder- ment had him fast, and he was blinking at us through the tortoise-shell specs. I laughed to myself for pure ecstasy, but I knew the outburst was coming, and wished it were over with. At last he opened his lips and closed them. Then he stalked up and down awhile, his cheeks puffing like a bellows, and Nan all the time with her back to him, working unconsciously. Finally he stopped short, decisively, and glared at us. " Look here you, young Rip I'm out-and-out obliged to you, for that little catamou't has been the torment of CONCLUSION 427 my life, and now there'll be some peace on the ranch on my ranch, I mean." Whereat Nan swung round, and flung her arms about his neck. " Some peace on the ranch," he kept blustering through his shaggy moustache, trying to convince himself, and us, of what a pleasant prospect he had, "Some peace on the ranch." "Better wait till the war's over," suggested Deaf Smith. "But isn't it?" exclaimed Nan, "Well, hardly. Not while Sant' Ana is loose some- where in Texas." "What," demanded Nan, in a tone that put us all at attention, "what would you do with him?" "String him up like the mad dog he is," said Buckalew. "But I can't deliver anybody over to death," said Nan simply. "You?" ejaculated her father, "Now what do you know about Sant' Ana?" Deaf Smith stepped in front of her. "Tell us," he said. She shook her head. "Nan," I pleaded, "if we could get him once, he'd order all his armies out of Texas to save himself. Don't you see we wouldn't hang him? He's too valuable." "You mean it?" Deaf Smith gripped her arm. "Of course," he said. Then she told us. A Mexican fugitive had crawled to the kitchen window on hands and knees only a few hours before. She was alone there at the time, baking the first wheat bread we had had in months, which she intended for her father. The other women were in the front part of the house. Still, there was no danger. 428 THE LONE STAR The fugitive -was too low, too cringing, to so much as lift his eyes to her. But she recognised in him the cruel and powerful voluptuary of the fandango. He was whining now. He had escaped from the field of San Jacinto. But he had found the bridge destroyed, and could go no further. For the love of the Virgin, of the saints, would she not hide him there in the house from the pitiless Texans? "Where did you hide him then?" her father interrupted. "As though she would tell you, if shehad," I protested, "Or as if I'd hide one of our enemies in the first place," said she. "But where is he then? Where is he?" "Why Daddy, I don't know. He crawled away on his hands and knees, like he came." "A lot you've told us, after all." But Deaf Smith snatched up a lantern, and every man of us followed him out. All night long we beat the bushes, little by little spreading from the house as a centre. Morning came, and we had found only a dead body here and there, and one, of a common soldier, that was stripped of jacket and pantaloons. We went back and mounted, and continued as before. We had, though, about lost hope, and were working our way along Buffalo Bayou toward camp, when Yappe off at one end gave a yell, rushed excitedly to something he had seen in the high grass, and jumped from his horse. We galloped to him, and saw that the object in the grass was a man with a blanket thrown over his head. A hand was thrust from under the blanket, which had seized Yappe's honest black hand and carried it to the man's lips. Deaf Smith tore off the blanket, and the man hid his face in his arm. We drew back, muttering our disappointment, because the fugitive was garbed CONCLUSION 4 a 9 like a common soldier, in black-glazed cap, blue-cotton jacket, and white manta pantaloons. " Hump now. Show yourself," Buckalew ordered him. "I'm only a poor soldier," the fellow whined in Spanish. "Maybe so, with a fine linen shirt," said Buckalew. "And diamond studs in it," added Deaf Smith. "Get up!" But he had to be lifted by the scruff of the neck, and his arm wrenched aside, and then he raised a face to us mottled in purple and yellow, with all other shades coming and going. His eyes, like large black beads, were shrinking and currish and fawning. He grabbed frantically at Buckalew's hand, he being the nearest, and tried to mouth it. The old man leaped back as from the fang of a serpent. "You slobbering rat," he cried. "Try to come your old filthy tricks on me, do you? The Medina over again, eh? Think you'll turn the tables on me another time, eh? But there's no generalissimo nor nothing around to save your carcass now, understand? There's no doubts about your being walloped solid and sure this once, understand? But maybe you'd like to get an- other ransom out of me, eh? And insult another good woman, eh? And force me to choke you again, eh, until you kept your bargain? About my story of the Medina, now, you don't like it, I understand. Put me on your proscribed list, I understand. Well, well, it's a good story just the same, and I'm wondering how you'll like the sequel. The sequel to Goliad, too, by the way." Buckalew raised his pistol. I had drawn my own already, involuntarily, for here was Phil's murderer, and the murderer of those other four hundred boys at Goliad. I wished that I had killed him. I can't 430 THE LONE STAR help but wish to this day that I had killed him. No cowardly brutal monster ever deserved it more. Yet some impulse made me drop my weapon, and catch Buckalew's hand. To preserve this assassin meant saving our fellows from a battle against four or five thousand Mexicans. Perhaps it meant saving Texas. I don't care to speak of sacrifices, but to drop my pistol and turn Buckalew's was the greatest sacrifice of my life. The cringing hound was trying to buy us off too, and that made it unutterably harder. Deaf Smith and the rest of us struggled with the raging Buckalew. "Here now, here," pleaded Deaf Smith, knowing that no force could be permanent against the old man's fury, "here now, there's no better way to even up with the whole Mex'can nation than by sending this curse back among 'em." Buckalew slowly began to quiet down. "Oh," he said, "oh, that would be too dam' cynical a revenge, Deaf. Oh, oh but still, they deserve it." We took the "unconquered Napoleon of the West" into camp, We even let him ride, after he had exasperated us with his complaints of sore feet. He still had on the red-worsted slippers he had worn during his unlucky siesta the afternoon before. It was what he got, we told him, for being in such a hurry to run that he could not put on his boots. Next he cursed the wayward destiny that had toppled him from his pedestal of greatness. "But wasn't it so's you could notice that the Texians had something to do with it?" Buckalew asked in disgust, "I reckon, though, you wasn't loafing round to notice 'em much. But wait, oh just wait, till they see you now." The shifty black eyes roved in new terror. Every step of the way he begged us to keep his identity secret CONCLUSION 43I until the great and chivalrous General Houston coull set a guard to protect him. The noble General Hous- ton, he constantly assured himself, would be generous to a defeated enemy. With which we referred him to the chivalry of the victors at the Alamo and Goliad. However, we could not indulge Justice, though we fairly ached to see justice done, and we brought our captive to General Houston before the Texans crowding around us could learn who he was. Thus the meeting between the master adversaries, which long since in imagination I had required as the superb dramatic thing, came to pass after all. But this meeting of the vainglorious dictator of Mexico, now servile and fawning, and the theatric Sam Houston lying on a blanket under his live-oak, this meeting is a picture that spreads beyond my canvas. But imagina- tion need not be hedged within the frame here set. And it will not be, either, for there's nothing more alluring, more exquisitely satisfying, than this coup of poetic justice actually accorded us as a cold fact of history. It was the personal equation between race and race, long since predestined, and now eternally demonstrated. Under the live-oak Texas passed to us. just as she was bound to do from the very first. And I thank the Creator of men for that, but most of all, I thank Him for this little matter of the personal equation. \r^\