by Jeff Long
Houston polled the firelit faces. The majority were confused or simply carried away with the story. The man with greasy hair looked resentful at Houston's detour. Private Lamar alone seemed to have enjoyed or understood the tale.
"Wonderful," he said. His green spectacles glittered. "But would you indulge me, General. I fancy myself a poet of sorts, and yet I'm not sure I understand. Is your point that Crockett failed his illusions, or that his illusions failed him? Because if it's the first, then it makes the congressman a sad old fool who grabbed at empty air. And if it's the second, then he was wrong to come to Texas. And if he was wrong, then maybe we all are, because the illusions could fail us all, couldn't they, including the illusion of this army and even the illusion of Texas?"
Now the soldiers were truly bewildered. Not one of them understood what the private named for Napoleon could be driving at. "Take the jug and shut up, Lamar," one prescribed.
Houston spread his hands over the fire and took his time. He listened to the drizzle cut against the leaves like ants chewing. The night was growing chill against his back, reminding him that he still had to find a place to sleep. Some scamp had stolen his horse blanket, and so he needed a dry patch of ground or just a nest of needles under a pine.
"Crockett said it best," Houston finally responded. "Be sure
JEFF LONG
you're right, then Go Ahead." He looked up from the fire and the conspirators seemed like figments of smoke and shadows, like momentary spirits.
"But Go Ahead where? You can't go where your imagination doesn't lead you. Texas isn't going to be won through a rifle barrel, gentlemen, but through this," he tapped his skull. "This. A blast of dreams. Here's the weapon."
He was about to stand up and leave, but on second thought pulled out his whittling knife and unfolded the blade from the handle. He leaned forward and sliced off a prime chunk of the beef, then rummaged through their fire and helped himself to a torch. Sparks blew and Houston's assassins blinked and snorted.
"Sleep well, boys," he said and got to his feet, stretched his big shoulders, and stepped into the darkness, away from their fire, out where the alligators were roaring in the night.
Chapter Five
It was before dawn in their third week of the fallback. They had fallen asleep alongside the twin ruts of the wagon path and fog was skimming their campsite in cobalt rags. They were exhausted. But at the sound of a hoof puncturing the paper-thin ice glassing over a puddle, Houston came awake instantly.
The horsemen materialized the way Homer's spirits did from Hades, amid a pool of cattle blood and smoke. Houston recognized Juan Seguin. The great ranchero was mounted on a huge, still, black stallion rigged with a Spanish saddle and oak and leather stirrups that must have weighed five pounds and a vicious-looking bridle that could have been mistaken for a steel trap. The hair of its chest had been eaten to the hide by alkali dust. The horse had seen much territory, much weather.
Seguin was equally still as he surveyed the camp of sprawled soldiers. He had easy, wide shoulders and his hooflike jaw was scraped clean. Leather chaps half-covered his skin pants that were unbuttoned down the outside of each shin. Strapped to each black boot he wore heavy spurs with rowels the size of dollars. He had thrown back one corner of his dun serape, exposing a short buckskin jacket and under that a woven shirt.
What startled Houston more than the early hour was Se-guin's astonishing dignity. To his surprise Houston felt jealousy shoot through him. He wanted Seguin's horse, and his calm, his certainty. Seguin belonged, Houston could tell. Wherever the man went, he belonged.
Grouped around their boss, Seguin's vaqueros sat in their
horses so naturally they looked almost like a painting of centaurs Houston had once seen when he was a congressman in Washington. There were ten or eleven of them. Dressed in buckskin and old cloth with boots or thongs on their feet or just barefoot with spurs bound to their heels, none presented so magnificently as their leader. But under their wide hats and black Indian hair, their eyes glittered with Seguin's own self-possession.
The sleeping army became aware of the newcomers with comic suddenness. "Goddamn," wailed a soldier. "The goddamn Meskins got us." That would be one of Sherman's, Houston guessed, some newcomer who'd never seen a Mexican and couldn't tell the friendlies from the hostiles.
The men reared up and stumbled, panicked by Seguin upon his midnight horse. Their eyes burned white in faces blued by their mess fires and by every variety of filth. They had twigs and dung in their hair and beards and their teeth were frightful. Here and there bundles of rags lay quivering in the grass: malaria.
Houston only wished he'd woken an hour earlier and the Mexican could have found him sitting by a fire, reading or writing dispatches or just diligently whittling. As it was, Houston had to separate himself from the cold ground and stand up and limp through the mud with frozen joints. He seated his tri-corner hat upon his head and had the distinct feeling it wasn't on straight.
"Generalisimo" Seguin greeted Houston. The frost poured from his mouth. Then his Spanish issued forth in a gush.
Houston caught less than three words in the whole address. "Mr. Smith," he called out.
"Deef s gone spying," someone said.
"Go find an interpreter," Houston ordered. "And be quick about it."
A slight young man in a hunting shirt stepped forward. "I've studied the language, sir," he offered.
"Mr. Bryan," Houston said, relieved. Moses Bryan was a blood relation to Stephen Austin and had his wizened uncle's big doelike eyes and thin shoulders and outsized forehead. "Please welcome Captain Seguin to the headquarters of the Army of the Republic of Texas," Houston said.
Moses Bryan and Seguin were no strangers. They carried
on in rapid Spanish for a minute or two. Finally Seguin threw a command over his shoulder and one of the vaqueros nudged forward on his mount. The man's right arm was crooked around a bundle of weapons which he now lowered to the ground and let drop in the mud.
Houston's soldiers clustered around the weapons and stared as if these were artifacts from China, say, or the Sandwich Islands. There were two broken-off Mexican lances in the bundle, plus four or five British Betsys with bayonets fixed. Houston also saw a pistol and two swords without sheaths.
"Captain Seguin wishes to present you with his latest harvesting of the Mexican army, General. These arms were captured from a forward patrol under General Ramirez y Sesma."
Houston's soldiers murmured contentedly like lions catching the scent of prey. At long last, here was proof of a war and an enemy. Houston sucked his teeth and looked around at his sorry bunch. This heap of weapons was the closest nine out of ten of them had ever gotten to a battle. At this moment he wouldn't have trusted them to face a herd of cows, much less an army drawn on the Napoleonic model. They suffered from the same diseases Travis and Bowie had, hubris and ignorance. They despised their enemy, and they didn't even know him.
"Look here," a man cried out. He pulled a rifle with a broken stock from the pile of weapons. "I know this gun. It's Colonel Crockett's, by God."
"Hold her up," another soldier demanded, "show us Old Davy's rifle." The crowd pressed closer.
"Pass her back, let us touch that gun."
"Blood!" someone declared. "See upon the stock." It looked more like common barrel rust leaching onto the cherry wood to Houston, but the soldiers accepted it as blood. That led to other conclusions.
"Mexican blood!"
"And a busted stock, by God. He clubbed his rifle, boys! Old Davy went down swinging!"
"They say he took ten of them with him."
"I heard sixteen."
Something was happening. Before Houston's eyes, a broken rifle was being transformed into a holy relic. Crockett was getting deified. Houston frowned. He stepped away, trying to concentrate on business.
"My congratulations to the captain and his men," Houston said to Bryan. "Has he come across Colonel Fannin, by any chance?"
Br
yan had already asked. "No sir. Not a sign."
"Ask him, what can he tell us about our pursuers?" Ordinarily Houston would have taken the intelligence in privacy, but he wanted his men to hear the details themselves. Maybe it would curb their arrogance.
Bryan and Seguin exchanged words for a couple minutes.
"The captain estimates that twelve hundred troops under Sesma crossed the Colorado at Beason's Ford," Bryan said. "A second column of seven hundred under General Antonio Gaona is approaching Bastrop to our north. And General Urrea is far to our south with another fourteen hundred men, sealing off the coast."
Seguin added something more.
"Urrea is like a wolf among sheep," Bryan translated. "The people say he captured a small group of Americans going to Matamoros and that he executed his prisoners. They speak of more death at his hands."
That would be Johnson or Grant, Houston knew, the only two men in Texas who were bigger fools than Travis. He'd warned them not to take their bands of men deeper into Mexico, but they'd insisted there was gold and booty at the port city. Now they were dead.
"Goddamn me if I believe a word," some grizzly soldier huffed. "You believe a goddamn greaser?"
Whether or not Seguin comprehended the man's English, he understood the sentiment. Without so much as a look at his detractor, he handed back some words of his own. Bryan made the translation.
"Captain Seguin says that a month ago, he placed a scout along the Rio Grande. This scout sighted the Mexican army on their approach to San Antonio. He rode day and night to give an early warning to Bowie and Travis. But they were dancing at a fandango. He says Travis refused to listen. Travis wanted to dance."
Bryan paused, then resumed. "No one will accept the truth from a Tejano. Captain Seguin says it's sad that only the dead will listen to him."
Seguin shrugged and flicked at his thigh with the tip of
one rein. Houston envied the man's discipline. It showed in everything from his tamed stallion and straight spine to his vaqueros silent obedience. With a hundred men like Seguin's, Houston knew he could defeat Santa Anna. Between the rivers that cut Texas into a hundred battle zones, such a force could strike and disappear and strike again. That was exactly how the Russians had exhausted Napoleon. But Houston had only this riot on feet.
"You say, you greaser, you say," a mud-caked soldier blustered up at Seguin. He was dressed in the uniform of Sherman's Buckeye Rangers. Then Houston saw that this buffoon was Sherman, his red side whiskers crusted with mud or dung on one side. The man had been into the jug already this morning or was barely out of it from last night.
"You tell that goddamn high and mighty greaser . . ." someone else pealed.
Seguin glanced down at Houston. In that instant Houston could see the Mexican was ashamed for him, and he blushed.
"General," Bryan lowered his voice. "The captain says they captured a courier of the Mexican army. The courier told them that Santa Anna wishes to compliment our fast legs. He said we run quicker than rabbits. He wishes to quit chasing us. Santa Anna invites us to meet him upon the prairie and engage him in combat."
Seguin's words set the army off.
"Goddamn Santyany," someone howled. "I'll kill that goddamn Santyany, I'll kill ever goddamn Meskin, I'll kill . . ."
"We should have held them at the Colorado," a man declared. Houston thought he recognized Wharton's hoarse voice.
"By God," someone yelled out. "Let us see the color of their blood. Let us smell it. It will smell like ditchwater, I say, mixed of every low race upon our continent."
"Fight, boys, we must fight, boys." It was Colonel Sherman.
I'm being tested, Houston realized. Tested or baited. But why? It was a hell of a time and place to make the test. The army resented Seguin's presence and Seguin was doing nothing to lessen their resentment. Not only did the Tejano have dark skin, not only did he speak the language and practice the religion of the enemy, but he had fought and they were running. He had the dignity of arms. They had none, none that could be demonstrated. He was very deliberately pricking their pride. Having
lit the fuse, Seguin calmly watched Houston from atop his black stallion.
Unless something was said, and quickly, Houston could see the morning blowing up with violence. Someone might just decide to shoot one of Seguin's vaqueros. They might shoot Seguin himself. And as valuable as Seguin was for his ranger skills and the information he brought, he was more valuable because of his color. Scarcely a handful of Tejanos had allied with the Americans to fight for Texan "independence." Seguin and these few horsemen were all that clothed what was otherwise naked theft.
"Mr. Bryan," Houston said. He reached for his old stump-making vocabulary and darkened his voice so that it would throw the extra stretch. The din subsided. "I want you to convey to Captain Seguin my esteem for his manly vigor. He has met our enemy and defeated him on the field of battle. He has struck a blow for independence."
Bryan translated swiftly. Seguin watched Houston's face and was suitably unimpressed with the flattery. It wasn't for his consumption anyway. Houston was talking to his own men, trying to curb their stampede of emotions.
"We must keep our army organized and disciplined," Houston spoke. "That way, and that way only, can we meet and vanquish the despotic thousands. Never forget, we are battling for human liberty. Reason and firmness and wisdom must characterize our acts."
He went on in that manner for a few minutes more, plundering snatches of speeches he'd heard Old Hickory emit, speeches which Jackson, in his day, had plundered from Revolutionary War leaders. Over and over again he sang out the key words: liberty, blood, despotism, patriotism. The passions cooled beneath Houston's song. His herd calmed.
"Under the hand of you yeomen warriors," he said, "we shall convert this howling swamp to a gentle field, we shall tame these rivers and bring commerce forth from the field. We shall make land of this wilderness."
In the distance they could hear the wind mounting, another storm getting ready to blow.
"Hell, General," a man called out. "I ain't no farmer. I come to try my spunk, is what."
"Good man," Houston soothed him.
Seguin seemed amused. He spoke to Bryan.
"The captain's prisoner had one more thing of interest," Bryan relayed. "He said that Santa Anna has put a price of five thousand dollars on your head, General. He wants to take it back to Mexico City in an iron cage and hang it from the walls of the national theater."
For an instant Houston was fascinated by the image, his own head captured like an exotic bird, dangling in some exotic capital.
"I know the Mexicans," a voice called out. Wharton again? "They got black hearts and mean ways and they are Papists, all of them. They kill prisoners. They are mercenaries and pirates. They'll rape our women. We must fight."
"Why are these Meskins in our camp?" another cried. "They are spies, by gad. They'll tell."
Houston raced to get control again. "Where is Captain Seguin's prisoner?" he asked.
"The courier?" Bryan translated for Seguin.
"Yes, the courier. I want to talk to him myself."
Seguin solemnly ran one finger from ear to ear.
"You see?" an excited fellow shouted. "They kill their own people."
"Goddamn it," Houston swore to himself, then spoke loud. "Mr. Bryan, you tell the captain this army has a policy of not killing prisoners. I want that clear. We are different from our enemy." We are better than them. "There will be no more killing without my say-so."
Bryan told the ranchero and Seguin smiled coyly, almost as if he'd expected the chastising. "General, since that's your policy, the captain says he does have one prisoner. He says he'll gladly give this man to you."
"He captured another courier?" Houston said.
"No, sir. He says he caught this one yesterday."
"Well who is he?"
"He says there are men out there who are more like animals," Bryan said. "They come riding up to the rear of refugees in
flight and spread the alarm that the Mexicans are coming. The poor women and children panic and drop their bundles and leave their wagons and run. Then these animals take their time picking through the goods. This is one such man. Captain Seguin's rangers caught him thieving the refugees," Bryan
translated. "He was drunk. Also he was raping a refugee woman. A white woman."
The crowd went utterly blank for a moment.
Then men began screaming "Dirty Meskins" and "They've caught our women" and "Whip out the greaser."
"Here's my rope," a soldier offered. "We'll string him
high.-
"Captain Seguin asks what kind of justice you will show such a man," Bryan said.
"He will be held as a prisoner of war," Houston said.
Seguin shook his head no. "This man is not an enemy soldier," Bryan said.
It took Houston a moment to realize Seguin might be turning over one of his own people, possibly one of his own vaqueros. Houston was baffled. Seguin had either an extraordinary code of honor or else some other motive. It could be he was trying to curry favor with Houston or to prove himself to the Americans. But Seguin wasn't the sort to need favor or popularity. It was unlikely such a proud man cared what anyone except for his God thought of him.
"In that case," Houston muttered, "tell the captain that his soldier will receive justice like any other accused of a crime."
When Bryan told him that, Seguin grinned. Bryan edged closer to Houston, a confused look on his face. "Captain Seguin says, we will see."