Seguin nodded.
Travis shook his hand. “Go with God.”
Seguin whistled distinctively to his men on the west wall; it was a private signal they had developed for themselves. They might be fighting side by side with the gringos, but it was always best to stick together. Seguin called out, “I will see you soon, my friends!” He waved. When he did, men on the north wall started firing their rifles and one cannon as a diversion. Bowie slapped the horse’s crup and Seguin raced out the gate.
Crockett stood at the palisade, watching Seguin thread away into the night. Bowie walked over to him. “Makes a man ponder the possibilities, do it not?” he said. Bowie slumped in the shadows at the end of the low barracks. “Even the great Davy Crockett.”
Crockett said, “You are kind of famous, too, Mr. Bowie.”
Bowie said, “Not famous, notorious. There’s a difference.” He peered at Crockett. “Lose your fur cap?”
Crockett smiled a little sheepishly. “I just put it on when it is extra cold.” Bowie still stared at him, not convinced. “Truth is,” Crockett said, “I only started wearing that thing because of that feller in that play they did about me.” He looked off into the darkness beyond the fort. “People expect things,” he said softly.
Bowie nodded. “Ain’t it so.” They sat silently for a moment, then Bowie said, “Can I ask you something?”
Crockett said, “All right.”
Bowie asked, with a look of studied seriousness on his face, “Which was tougher: jumping the Mississippi or riding a lightning bolt?”
Crockett grinned. “Stories are like tadpoles. Turn your back on one and it’s grown arms and legs and gone hoppin’ all over creation.” His smile faded a little and he looked Bowie in the eye. “And I tell you, I did not make one cent off that book that feller wrote. If anyone ever tells you they wanna write you up, Jim, you make ’em pay you first.”
A cannon shot boomed from the Mexican lines and hit the north wall opposite them. It brought their attention back to their situation.
“Can you catch a cannonball?” Bowie said. Neither man smiled this time.
Crockett sighed. “If it was just simple old me, David, from Tennessee, I might drop over the wall some night and take my chances,” Crockett said. “But this Davy Crockett feller, they are all watching him. He’s been fightin’ on this wall every day of his life.”
Bowie nodded. He understood what Crockett was saying. Perhaps, he understood it better than any other man in the fort could have. “Sam Houston sent me down here to blow this fort up,” Bowie said. He paused for a long moment while both he and Crockett considered the idea. Bowie said, “I wish I had listened to him.”
Crockett said, “I wish I had not.”
Bowie tried to rise but collapsed. Crockett and Autry helped him to his feet and walked him the few steps to the bed in his quarters. Standing that close, Crockett could feel the heat of the fever radiating from Bowie. They gently laid him on his cot and Juana came over to him with a damp cloth to soothe his face. Travis walked into the room as Autry left to return to the palisade. Sam sat opposite, ready to help if ordered, but unwilling to volunteer.
“He is burning with fever,” Juana said.
Travis said, “Draw him a tub of cool water. If the fever breaks, try to get him to drink something.” He paused. “Something not whiskey.”
At the top of the hill to the south of the Alamo, Seguin, now safe, stopped his horse. He turned and looked back on the lights of Béxar and the mission. Down below were his hometown, his friends. He would return. He swore it to himself, and to them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Colonel Frank Johnson sat by the window of his quarters and watched the cold rain hammer down on the streets of San Patricio. When his aide, Private Todish, brought him a cup of fresh coffee, Johnson thanked him, took a cautious sip, and chuckled to himself. It was a good night to be snug and warm inside. He listened to the howling wind and driving rain and smiled when he thought of Grant and his company, out in the wilderness trying to round up wild horses. They must be miserable right now. But Johnson was perfectly content. There was nothing he enjoyed more than a warm bed on a cold, stormy night, especially if that bed contained a willing lady. But there was no such good fortune tonight. The citizens of San Patricio were not altogether thrilled to have them there. That meant the local señoritas had not been nearly as friendly and accommodating as in other towns—especially Béxar.
Todish turned down Johnson’s bed and withdrew. Johnson picked up a favorite novel, Quentin Durward, and pulled the candle on the table a little closer.
Grant had worried about splitting their command. His wild-horse expedition left Johnson holding San Patricio with only thirty-four men. “The horses are crucial,” Johnson had told him. “We are in no danger here for the moment. The sooner we are fully equipped, the sooner we can move on to meet Fannin at Goliad and then move on to capture Matamoros.” Grant had reluctantly agreed, and rode out the next day with twenty-six men, including Placido Benavides and Reuben R. Brown. Both of them were excellent horsemen and Benavides, especially, knew the area like the back of his hand.
They could be expected to return in the next day or so with a herd of wild horses. If Grant and his men were unsuccessful, then they would simply have to move on, farther south, and hope that they would have better luck closer to Matamoros.
Johnson read the thrilling prose of Sir Walter Scott for nearly an hour until he found his eyes drooping with fatigue. He stood up, stretched and yawned. As he took the first step toward his bed, he felt a violent explosion. It rocked the house so brutally that Johnson was almost thrown to his knees.
At first he thought it was a particularly hellish thunder. But when it happened five times in quick succession, he knew what was causing the uproar: cannon fire.
On the hill above San Patricio, General José Urrea smiled benignly at the scene. The Texians had been so oblivious of danger that he found his task almost too easy. When his intelligence reported that a small party of Texians had ridden out of San Patricio two days earlier, Urrea sent other scouting parties to report on the defenses of the town. The foolish Texians had divided their few men into five separate parties. Two were guarding horses. One stood paltry sentinel at the main road leading into town, and two others guarded the outer edges.
Urrea knew that these five parties constituted nearly the entire Texian force. There could not be more than five or six other men in town. He had pulled his army into position earlier in the day, without alerting the Texians down in San Patricio. When the hard rain began to fall at dusk, Urrea knew that the time was right to act. No one would ever expect an attack during such weather. He lined up three cannon and aimed them at the town. Then he dispatched troops to cover each of the five parties of Texians. The result would not even be an attack, in the strictest sense of the word; it would be more like target practice.
Urrea waited until nearly three o’clock in the morning, to make sure that the Texians would be caught totally off guard. His riflemen took every precaution to keep their powder and muskets dry, and raced silently to their positions, two hundred yards from San Patricio. The cannon fire would be their signal to rain volleys of musket balls on the rebels.
Because of the driving rain, Johnson barely heard the musket fire in the distance, but the relentless cannon fire convinced him that the battle was already lost. He thought that placing his men around the town would make it certain that the Mexicans could not approach on any side without being spotted. Johnson had not counted on an attack like this, not in the middle of the night; not in a driving rainstorm. Now his men were hopelessly separated and there was no way to get them together again, or even to get orders to them.
The Texians at their posts were startled out of wet blankets and uncomfortable sleep by volley after volley of gunfire. They jumped to their positions and began firing into the darkness. The small, separated parties fought bravely, but they were beaten before they started. In moments ten
Texians lay dead or dying on the ground. As over a hundred Mexicans began to descend into the town, the remaining eighteen Texians stood up with their hands over their heads.
Johnson knew that a few of his officers were in town, but he did not know where. Even Todish, his aide, had vanished without a trace, no doubt scurrying into the darkness to save his own skin. Johnson thought about it for a moment, as the house continued to shudder with the cannon blasts, and decided that Todish’s plan was a good one. Discretion must be the better part of valor on this rainy night. Dressing quickly, Johnson slipped out of the house, ran down the street and scurried out to the nearby woods. Once there he would keep running until he couldn’t run anymore.
Dr. Grant sniffed the air and said, “It smells like rain.”
Plácido Benavides stretched out comfortably on his bedroll and pointed toward the horizon, over the trees. “Look how dark the sky is over San Patricio,” he said. “I wager that they are getting soaked.” He was still for a moment. “Listen,” he said. “Do you hear thunder?”
Reuben R. Brown smiled and sipped from his coffee cup. “Well, better them than us. At least they got roofs.”
Benavides laughed, but Grant did not. Grant almost never laughed. Just one more reason why Benavides would rather have been with Johnson than with Grant. He had fought alongside Johnson during the siege of Béxar and had spent several perilous hours with him under fire at the Veramendi House. He admired Johnson’s bravery, but he also appreciated his sense of humor. Grant, Benavides believed, was completely lacking in humor. But he had to admit that the Scotsman was brave, the kind of man who always rode to the sound of the guns, no matter how desperate the situation.
Brown had arrived in Béxar the very day that General Cós and his troops were filing out of the Alamo in defeat. Feeling that he had missed all the action, Brown had enthusiastically joined up with the Matamoros Expedition. He volunteered for this wild-horse roundup in much the same way—he far preferred to be doing something, even something dangerous, than to spend idle hours in tedious safety.
Benavides pulled his blanket up around his neck. “Perhaps we had better get some sleep while we can, before we get soaked with whatever is raining down on San Patricio right now.”
The next morning dawned bright and clear, with no sign of rain in the sky. Grant, Benavides and Brown broke camp and began riding at an easy gallop back toward town. About a half mile behind them, the other twenty-three men of their party were riding herd on over four hundred wild horses. Brown was delighted at their good luck. It had taken only three days—three arduous days—to round up the horses and now, with them, the last obstacle to moving on Matamoros was hurdled. Now they were in for some real action.
Up ahead in the woods, about sixty mounted dragoons waited. General Urrea had questioned some of the Texian prisoners during the night. One Texian, a former New Yorker named Groneman, had cracked under the threat of torture and revealed where Grant and his party were. Urrea was not certain that they would return today, but he knew they would come back soon. The dragoons settled in for a long wait, but it was less than an hour after they arrived that they heard the thundering of hundreds of approaching hooves. Like the attack on San Patricio the night before, this was almost too easy.
The dragoons allowed Grant, Benavides and Brown to ride past, then the sixty horsemen emerged from the wood and raced forward, cutting off the main force, lances leveled. The startled Texians reached for their guns, but many of them were impaled before they could make a move. Others had pistols at the ready. They fired several shots, knocking two of the dragoons out of their saddles.
At the sound of the gunfire, Benavides whirled around. “Grant! Brown!” he yelled. “Behind us!”
Grant and Brown turned their horses around and galloped back. When they reached Benavides he had already loaded two pistols. Impatiently, he waved them on, “Let’s go!” he said. “We have to help them!”
He started to ride toward the fight, but Grant quickly grabbed his reins. “Not you,” he said. “If the Mexicans are here, then they have already come through San Patricio. That probably means that the town has fallen. You need to ride on to Goliad and warn Fannin about this.”
Benavides shook his head furiously. “No!” he shouted. “This is my fight, as well as yours.”
Brown said, “Grant’s right, Plácido. You grew up here. You know every crack and crevice in the ground. You can make it. Maybe we couldn’t.”
Benavides looked at the two men. He knew they were right. Without another word, he nodded firmly, turned his horse and galloped away.
Brown and Grant looked back at the battle raging two hundred yards away. They saw that the ground was already littered with Texian dead. There seemed to be almost no Mexican casualties. The dragoons were encountering far more trouble from the wild horses, which were stampeding, breaking through the Mexican ranks and disappearing into the woods.
Grant said, “What do you think?”
Brown smiled a rueful smile. “Never did want to grow old, anyway. I believe we had better ride in and die with our boys.”
Grant held his hand out and Brown shook it. “Let us go amongst ’em,” Grant said. “God bless you.”
The two men rode directly for the Mexicans, firing their pistols from the saddle. They brought down two more Mexicans with four bullets. One dragoon wheeled around and rammed a lance through the breast of Brown’s horse. The horse pitched forward and Brown flew from the saddle, landing unhurt in a pile of brush by the road. As the dragoon came for him, Brown leaped to his feet and sprinted toward a riderless horse. He jumped into the saddle, narrowly avoiding the tip of the dragoon’s lance.
Grant, his pistols empty and with no time to reload, pulled his sword from its sheath and slashed away at the attacking Mexicans. He sliced a deep cut into one Mexican’s arm and managed to stab another in the throat. Brown reloaded one pistol and shot a Mexican as he rode up behind Grant. Brown shouted, “They are all dead, Grant! We’d best get out of here!”
Grant was not the kind of man who shrank from a fight, but he was also not suicidal. He nodded at Brown and turned his horse around. The two Texians raced down the road with fifteen dragoons in close pursuit. Brown managed once again to load his pistol. He heard Grant call, “Look out!” and turned to see the lance of a dragoon just a few inches from his back. Stretching his arm behind him, he fired the pistol point-blank into the Mexican’s face. Dead, the rider continued to sit upright in the saddle of the galloping horse for several dozen yards before slipping off and rolling into the woods.
Grant and Brown were able to maintain their lead, mile after mile, but the Mexicans showed no sign of slowing. They heard men calling from behind them, “Surrender!” “Do not force us to kill you! Surrender!”
Grant shouted, “They want us to give up, Reuben.”
“I think we had better not,” Brown replied. “We know what they do to men who surrender.”
After a gallop of nearly seven miles, all of the horses showed signs of exhaustion. Somehow, Grant and Brown managed to stay out front. Suddenly, Brown felt a blinding pain in his arm and felt himself being pulled from his horse. A dragoon had thrown his lance. Its point had embedded itself just above Brown’s elbow. The weight of the lance threw off Brown’s balance and he fell to the ground. The Mexican who brought him down rode up to Brown with a rope. Brown raised his pistol and fired. Blood spurted from the man’s temple and he fell to the ground, jerking spasmodically for a few seconds before going still.
He had no time to reload. Other dragoons were dismounting and walking toward him. Behind them, he heard Grant scream. A dragoon had pulled him off his horse and the Scotsman’s body was immediately pierced by several lances.
With effort, Brown got up and attempted to run. A Mexican looped a lasso over his head and dragged him to the ground. Unable to move, Brown looked at the Mexicans with curiosity. He was too exhausted and in too much pain to be frightened. Just before he passed out he thought, I wonder wh
y they are not killing me.
Brown woke up in a cold brown room with stone walls. He had been covered by a thin blanket. His arm had been bandaged and a plate of bread and a cup of coffee had been placed on a small table beside his cot. The door to the room was open, but two Mexican soldiers stood guard there. When they heard him stirring, one turned around and said in perfect English, “Good morning.”
Brown took a sip of coffee. It was cold but felt wonderful coursing down his parched throat. When he felt that he could speak again he said, “Where am I?”
The soldier said, “Matamoros.” He laughed. “Is that not where you wanted to go?” The soldier repeated his sentence in Spanish and the man beside him burst into laughter. The first soldier said, “Texian, come here.” He pointed down the hallway. “There is something that you should see.” Brown cautiously stood up. Every muscle in his body screamed with pain. He limped over to the door and looked toward where the Mexican was pointing.
In a room down the hall, Grant’s bloody corpse had been placed on a table. It was surrounded by a group of laughing Mexican officers who plunged their swords into it over and over, as if enjoying a particularly grisly party game.
Brown felt the bile rise in his throat. “My God!” he said. “Why are they doing that?”
“That is James Grant,” the soldier said, as if that were explanation enough. “Many of the officers knew him.”
Brown was aware that Grant had been involved in some shady business dealings in Mexico. He could only guess that some of those dealings involved some of the men who were currently having such a gleeful time mutilating his corpse. He watched in horror for a few seconds, wondering if this was some sort of macabre preview of what the Mexicans had in store for him.
Brown limped back to his cot and sat down. He leaned his head against the cold stone wall and closed his eyes, waiting for them to come and kill him, too.
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