by Judith Pella
Reinforcements from Bastrop and La Grange brought the numbers of Texans to nearly five hundred. After several more successful engagements, Woll’s army fell into a full retreat. When the Mexicans reached the border, the Texan commanders argued to end the pursuit. There was a small contingent of dissenters, but the majority won out. There were too many practical considerations. The army was worn out from long marches and little food, and most of the horses had reached their physical limits. Ammunition supplies were also low.
Micah’s first taste of real battle since San Jacinto proved not to be as satisfying as he would have hoped. Most of the time he was off scouting, and the encounters he did participate in were far too few and too brief. He hated letting Woll escape across the border and was hardly mollified at the promise that the Texans would regroup in a month, after men and supplies were bolstered, to continue the pursuit.
Regardless of how disgruntled he was, he had to admit that at least this battle had not left a legacy of nightmares. He decided he had finally grown out of all that.
CHAPTER
22
SEVERAL WEEKS AFTER THE DUST of battle settled, as November made its appearance, Lucie made a point to go into town. Even her father did not protest. He knew as well as she the importance of being seen standing proud among their neighbors.
Manuel Ruiz, the shopkeeper, kept his eyes averted as he spoke to Lucie. “You have a long list, Señorita Lucie.”
She nodded, trying with her own eyes to get him to look at her, but he kept staring at the paper she’d written on. “We ran low on many things during the fighting,” she said to the bald spot on the top of Ruiz’s head.
“Supplies are low here as well, but merchandise has started coming in. Flour, yes,” he said referring to the list. “But no sugar. And I can give you a pound of coffee, no more. I may have a few buttons—white, not black.”
“That will have to do, then.”
Ruiz hurried to the back storeroom as if fleeing the Evil One himself. Ruiz had been a family friend, drawn closer because he and Lucie were among the few Mexican Protestants in the area. He attended her church, a small assembly that had sprung up since the revolution. But she tried not to blame him for his reticence now. He had himself to protect.
Some Mexican citizens of San Antonio had departed the town with General Woll. Among them were Juan Seguin and Antonio Perez, two prominent citizens. Those who left would never be trusted again. Those who remained were not officially reprimanded in any way, yet a pall of suspicion would hang perpetually over them, perhaps forever. They would have to work harder than ever to prove their loyalty. They would have to studiously avoid suspicious associations, such as with the sister of a notorious Mexican outlaw. Lucie understood this. She understood that the only reason she was able to remain north of the Rio Grande at all was because her father was an Anglo, and no one who knew him could honestly reproach his loyalty.
Many white males had taken Mexican wives and could thus be held suspect, and in fact, many were. But this alone could not condemn a man. Reid was probably the only one who also had for a son a man who was an outlaw and most assuredly an agent for Santa Anna. Yet Reid had many friends, including Sam Houston himself. It would take more than the likes of Axel Carlton and his handful of cohorts to discredit Reid.
Lucie wandered idly around the store as she waited for Ruiz to fill her order. She was looking through a small crate of books, the only books to be found in the store, when the front door creaked open. Glancing up from the volume she held open in her hand, she saw Micah Sinclair.
Framed in the open door with the glaring afternoon sun behind him, he looked as if he were some kind of ethereal creature, illuminated by a hallowed glow. For a moment Lucie forgot all about her animosity toward this man who had betrayed her. She saw only the handsome boyish face of the man who had saved her life, tenderly holding her, risking his freedom for her. She remembered how vulnerable and dear he had been with the orphaned baby, and how hard he had tried to camouflage the soft core of his heart.
Micah took off his hat as he entered the store, perhaps out of habit in the presence of a lady. His hair, seeming more golden than ever with the sun glancing off its tangled strands, had grown since she had last seen him, curling about his collar, the long side strands tucked haphazardly behind his ears. His complexion was quite ruddy from long hours in the sun, and his chin and jaw were covered with reddish stubble.
“Ma’am,” he began casually, then he took more than casual note of the woman in the store. “Lucie!” he said with soft intensity. For a moment his eyes glittered with blue warmth, and a smile invaded his lips.
Lucie tried not to think of the touch of those lips upon hers, or that even now, in spite of everything, she longed to be held by him again. But even as her heart skipped a beat or two, even as her body reacted hungrily to the sight of him, she remembered his betrayal. And she steeled herself against her own betraying body and heart.
“Mr. Sinclair,” she said stiffly, formally.
“How you been doing?” He stepped fully into the store, letting the door slam closed behind him. Though his tone was casual, she sensed a forced quality to it. From guilt?
“Fine.” She snapped shut the book in her hands. “Just waiting while Señor Ruiz fills my order.”
“I’m here to pick up a few supplies as well.” He shifted uncomfortably on his feet. “Won’t be long before the army invades Mexico.”
“Are you sure you should be telling me that?” she asked coldly.
“It’s common knowledge.”
“Good. I wouldn’t want you to reveal any state secrets. I may tell Santa Anna, you know.”
He squinted at her, perplexed, then shook his head. “I know you ain’t gonna do that.”
“Do you?”
“Of course I do!”
The certainty of his tone made Lucie momentarily doubt herself. Yet no one else had known of her meeting that night with her brother.
How desperately she wanted to believe that Micah was innocent, but the facts of the matter were too clear to be denied.
“Then why did you inform on me, Micah?”
“What’re you talking about?”
“The whole county knows about Joaquin being my brother!”
“Well, they didn’t hear from me!”
“Who else?”
“Never mind, Lucie,” he cut in sharply. “You believe what you want to believe.”
He turned away from her and wandered over to a barrel of apples. He gave these his attention, pawing through the contents, lifting out one apple, then another, as if searching for the perfect one. He finally found a likely candidate, plucked it out, and wiped it against the sleeve of his shirt, a peculiar action since his sleeve had to be dirtier than any apple skin.
Thoughtfully, as if he’d gained some wisdom in the apple search, he said, “Listen, if it got out about Viegas, I reckon it’s only natural you’d think I was the one who told. I didn’t, but I’ll allow the way it must look.”
“Well . . .” she tried hard to be as magnanimous as he, “I shouldn’t really blame you for doing your duty as a ranger. It was wrong of me to place you in such a compromising position.”
“Except I didn’t do it.” A tense silence fell between them. Micah continued to rub the apple against his sleeve as if polishing silver. Finally he spoke again. “We just can’t cut a break, can we?” The regret was clear in his tone, clearer in the darkly blue surface of his eyes. “I won’t deny there is something powerful between us, something I can’t explain. But whatever it is, even you’ve got to admit it has been doomed from the beginning.”
“It hasn’t been given much of a chance,” she allowed.
“Doomed, Lucie,” Micah said with more emphasis. “You said it that last night. We are too different, and there are just too many things going against us. You made the right decision when you said we shouldn’t see each other again.”
“I know I did,” she softly, reluctantly admitted. �
�I was right, but—”
He gave his head a dismissive shake. “But nothing, Lucie! A polecat and a prairie flower ain’t never gonna mix.”
“A polecat and a prairie flower?” She permitted a touch of amusement into her voice. “Who is the polecat, Micah?”
“This ain’t no time to jest.”
“If only there had been more jesting between us, more fun. Have I ever seen you smile, Micah, really smile? Dear me, how I would have liked that.”
“I never smile much,” he said flatly.
She had a sudden urge, despite the pain of the words spoken between them, to do something outrageous—a flying somersault, or perhaps take that mop rag and perch it upon her head—anything to draw one raucous belly laugh from her solemn ranger. But it wouldn’t happen. Not now. It was too late.
“You see it, too, don’t you?” he said dismally.
“Yes, but I don’t have to like it.”
“I hope then we can part on good terms—that is, with you not thinking I would betray you.”
She sighed with the hopelessness of it all. “Even if you had betrayed me, Micah, I don’t think I would have stayed mad at you long.”
“And I would not have cared about you being Mexican—” he broke off with an apologetic bent to his mouth. “I don’t mean that in any demeaning way. I guess I just mean that there are some things that can be accepted and others than can’t.”
“We have too many that can’t.”
“That’s the problem.”
Sighing, she replaced the book in the crate and turned toward the front counter. “I wonder what’s keeping the shopkeeper?”
“I’ll be on my way, Lucie.”
“What about your supplies?”
“I’ll come back later. Ruiz is busy now anyway.” He turned to go, opened the door, then paused.
The light again glinted in his hair, and the sight caused a lump in Lucie’s throat.
“Like I said before, the army will be departing soon. Can’t say how long we’ll be gone or what will come of it—” he stopped, a rueful, humorless twist to his lips. “Guess that don’t matter, though. I mean, you and I . . . we won’t be seeing each other again anyway.”
“Maybe occasionally, in the store like this,” she said, unable to mask the longing in her tone.
“Maybe. But . . . well, Good-bye, Lucie.”
“Good-bye, Micah.”
When he left, closing the door behind him, it was truly as if light, glorious, sweet light, had been cut off. Lucie wondered about what fools they both were. Fools for loving the unattainable. Fools for succumbing so easily to barriers. Fools for setting themselves up in the first place for what had been destined to fail.
But how could she be a fool if she had done the right thing, the only thing possible in ending this relationship with Micah?
Why did she feel such loss now, not only for what they’d had but also for what she had once been so certain they could have had? She had loved the man Micah was, but perhaps even more, she had loved the man she had believed him destined to become. Maybe that had been wrong, as her father warned her. And for that reason, she had said that “Good-bye”h a few moments ago. Yet it did not wipe out the love she still felt, and it did not make her believe in Micah any less.
“Dear God, I just don’t know what is right or wrong anymore. I only know I still love him. I am willing to let him go—” she snorted a dry laugh—“well, I hardly had a choice.” But even as she murmured the words, she realized she indeed had very much of a choice. She knew Micah felt something for her, and thus it would have been quite easy to use her feminine wiles to bend him to her will.
But it wasn’t her will she wanted.
“God, I can’t turn off my feelings for Micah. I’m not completely sure if some of them, at least, aren’t from you. But I am willing to place those feelings into your hands. Take them away from me, Lord, if it is your will. But if you would have us together, then change the situation between us—his prejudices about my blood, my fears about his life-style, his fears about losing his freedom, but most especially, his bitterness toward you. Bridge the gaps between us, Lord. If you can do that, then I will know it is a match made in heaven.”
CHAPTER
23
RAIN DRIPPED DOWN MICAH’S NECK. His hat sat like a pathetic, wilted flower on his head. Even his buckskin coat was soaked, weighing down on his shoulders like the burden of a failed life.
“This can’t go on much longer,” he muttered to no one in particular.
“I seen bogs like this go on for miles,” Tom said. “We could be mucking through here for days.”
“Days!” groaned Jed. He was afoot, leading his lame mount.
“We got Somervell to thank for this,” Tom said.
“I heard he decided to abandon the Laredo Road and go cross-country in order to flank Laredo,” Micah said, wiping fresh drips of rain from his eyes.
“Hogwash! He says that now to cover up the fact that he don’t know squat ’bout what he’s doing.” Tom hocked and spit his disdain into the wet air.
He was not the only disgruntled member of the hapless Texan army. It was now nearly the end of November. The army had sat idle for weeks, waiting for orders to begin an invasion of Mexico. In that time, the army that had swelled to a thousand was now down to less than eight hundred. Men had simply grown tired of waiting. Most were not soldiers and had left farms and families to join the army. But even this might not have stood in the way had there been better leadership. Somervell, commander of the militia, was perhaps the essence of incompetence. He wasted time with frivolous training and never indicated if he had a plan in mind for an invasion of Mexico. No wonder few believed it when he said this stumbling into a bog had not been entirely by accident.
“I gotta admit I had my doubts,” Micah said, “when we waited for that cannon to arrive—”
“Two weeks! Two whole weeks we waited for that cursed cannon,”
Tom erupted. “And then the blaggard decided not to take it!”
“We ever gonna fight, Tom?” Jed asked.
“There’s been plenty of fighting among ourselves,” Micah answered.
“And Somervell could prevent that, too, if he’d take a stand one way or another.”
Tom was no doubt referring to a confusion of command between Captain Hays’ ranger unit and Captain Bogart and his sixty Washington County men. The two small units had been combined to form a company, but there was no agreement as to who should be in command.
Somervell had come up with a cockeyed plan for splitting the duties.
“Any stupid idiot knows you can’t have two chiefs,” Tom declared.
“What if it’s Bogart that leads instead of Hays?”
“Why, that would be pure nonsense. Hays is the best man!”
And so the friction within the company continued, but that was only a small picture of what was plaguing the entire army.
For three days the men slogged through the bog, rain, and cold, chilled to the bone. Tom’s horse broke his leg and had to be shot. Micah, seeking to spare his buckskin, took to walking ankle-deep and Some times knee-deep in mud.
By December snow and sleet dogged the army, but they had finally come within sight of Laredo. Desperately needed supplies were requisitioned from the town, which, though Mexican, was not overly hostile toward the Texans. Then about sixty Texans decided the supplies received weren’t enough, and on their own volition, they raided the Mexican town, plundering and looting what supplies were left. Though these men were severely reprimanded by Somervell, their actions turned the heretofore cooperative Mexicans against the invaders. And it gave more proof than ever that the commander had little control over his army.
When an order was issued by the adjutant general, on December 19, for the army to return to Gonzales and disband, it was enough to further split the disintegrating army. Half the army was ready to go home, while the remaining force wanted to ignore the order and continue with the invasion of M
exico.
Several of the rangers discussed the matter as they sat around a campfire, barely flickering a small flame because only damp wood could be found with which to build a fire. Even the rangers were divided over the issue raised by the general’s order.
“We came to fight,” Big Foot Wallace said. “So far all we’ve done is scare the dickens out of a couple of Mexican villages.”
“What’s the point anymore?” Tom mused. “We ran Woll’s army out of San Antonio and out of Texas. And it’s pretty clear they had no intention of really taking Texas in the first place. They were just gauging our forces. What tactical purpose would there be in invading Mexico?”
“A show of force,” said Bill McBroome. “If we don’t hit back hard, they will just make further attempts until they succeed.”
“Well, we don’t have enough of an army to hit anything hard,” argued Tom. “Why, if the political situation weren’t so shaky and dis-organized in Mexico City, I doubt we’d have gotten this far.”
“Ain’t like you, Tom, to give up like this,” observed Micah.
“I’m cold and wet. My shoes got holes in ’em big enough to drive a wagon through. I ain’t giving up. I’m just being practical. We can’t fight with an army that’s half dead already.”
“Does that mean you ain’t gonna stay?” Jed asked.
Instead of answering directly, Tom turned to his captain. “What’re you gonna do, Jack?” he asked Hays. “I’ll go along with whatever you decide.”
Hays held his hands over the paltry flame and gave them a thoughtful rub before responding. “First off, I give you men leave to decide for yourself. But let me tell you what I told Fisher, who plans to lead the new invasion enterprise. I was scouting down Mier way, and I heard the Mexican army was gathering a large force to oppose us. I recommended to Fisher that he abandon his plan because we do not have the resources to meet such a force. I don’t like turning back, but I believe it is the prudent thing to do.”