“Yes, sir.” Jamie quietly left the man. He paused at the door. Bowie was writing, the only sound in the room the scratching of quill-point against the paper. Jamie stepped outside, gently closing the door.
Travis had been the first to call on Bowie. He now met Jamie just outside the door with a worried look on his face. “How did you find him, Scout MacCallister?”
“In good enough spirits.” He told Travis what Bowie had said for him to tell the men.
“Good! Good! That will bolster their resolve.” He patted Jamie’s shoulder and walked away.
The cannonade had picked up, and the Mexican gunners were getting better, the balls and grapeshot crashing against the walls of the mission. Each time they paused to reload, Crockett and his sharpshooters would line the walls and take their shots, and the defenders were taking a toll on the cannoneers.
The defenders of the old mission were still in a good mood, many of them cracking jokes and laughing while the cannonballs drew ever nearer.
Perhaps, Jamie thought, they still believed that reinforcements were on the way. Jamie was operating under no such illusions. Although he could not say why he was so sure of his feelings, he felt the men of the Alamo were being abandoned. Bowie had said from the outset that they would fight and die alone; that they were being used as a way to rally Texas behind the independence movement.
“When we die, lad,” Bowie had said, “all Texas will rise up and fight Mexico. As sure as the sun sets in the west, we are dead men. But we shall not die in vain. The blood spilled here will stain the conscience of all Texans and drive them to fight. Tough as hell on us,” he added dryly, “but good for Texas.”
As evening fell, Jamie slipped out of the mission, without telling anyone. Crockett and a few others watched him leave, but kept silent. They knew, to a man, that Jamie was not running from the fight, and that he would return. His reasons for leaving were his own, and none of their affair. But they also knew that Travis would soon miss him, and would probably demand answers. Travis did miss Jamie before an hour had passed, but he asked questions of no one except Bowie, and that was done in the privacy of Bowie’s quarters.
“I sent him out,” Bowie said, his voice a little stronger. “I wanted him to take my horse to a safe place.” Bowie handed Travis the bill of sale he’d penned that afternoon.
Travis read it and nodded his head. “You think we’re doomed, don’t you, Jim?”
“I think everyone has written us off, Bill. I think we’re being deliberately sent to our deaths. But I don’t resent it. Houston is meeting with the convention at this time, I’m sure.” He was, at Washington-on-the-Brazos. “Fannin is not going to move on his own, and the advisory council will not give him orders to come to our aid.” Fannin never received any orders to aid those at the Alamo, but he would, finally, make an attempt to reach the Alamo. It would come too late. “Bill,” Travis said, just before he closed his eyes to rest. “If I am to die, I could not ask to die in better company.”
In an unusual gesture of comradeship, for he was not an emotional man, William Travis reached down and gently clasped Bowie’s shoulder. “Nor I, Jim,” he said.
Bowie’s slave, Sam, sat in the darkness of a corner in the room and watched and listened. After Travis had left, he rose and came to Bowie’s side. Bowie sensed his presence and opened his pain-filled eyes. He handed the young man a folded sheet of paper.
“I know you can’t read, Sam. But this is your freedom. You’re a free man, now. This paper states that. You get yourself a white rag and walk right out of those gates and keep going.”
“I think I’ll stay for a time, Mr. Jim,” Sam replied.
“Don’t be a fool!” Bowie said sharply. “Get out of this death trap, Sam.”
Sam wet a cloth and bathed Jim’s flushed face. “You rest now. ”Time a-plenty for talkin’ later.”
Too weak and in too much pain to argue, Jim lay back and closed his eyes.
Sam retreated to a chair in the room and waited, ready to serve his master to the end.
* * *
Jamie made it easily through the enemy lines, still very lightly manned, for the bulk of Santa Anna’s army had not yet been placed, and rode to the Ruiz ranch outside of town. The Ruiz family was one of the oldest and most powerful of Mexican families in the area and even Santa Anna knew to leave the family alone. He was greeted warmly, as was and is the Mexican custom, and fed a huge meal.
“I don’t understand this,” Ruiz said, as Jamie ate. “You and your friends will gain nothing by dying at the old mission. You will accomplish nothing. I, too, want independence for Texas, but this way is... folly!”
“We’ll prove a point,” Jamie said.
“By dying? Santa Anna will not even bury your bodies. I know the man. He will order his soldiers to stack the bodies and put them to the torch and then scatter the ashes. What point will have been made?”
“That a free Texas is worth dying for,” Jamie replied.
Ruiz looked at the tall and powerfully built young Anglo with the long yellow hair. He slowly nodded his head. “You will stay the night and rest?”
“No. I’ll get back. Thanks for the meal, Senor Ruiz. You’ve been very gracious.” Jamie stood up and moved toward the door.
Ruiz shook hands with him. “Por nada. Vaya con Dios, Senor MacCallister.”
Just after midnight, Jamie slipped across the irrigation ditch and over the east wall. The sentry there noticed fresh scalps dangling from Jamie’s belt.
“Gonna give them to Travis, too?” he asked, a slight smile playing at his mouth.
Jamie smiled and shook his head. “Colonel Travis was forced into the humor of it the first time. I doubt he’d find a second time very amusing. How’s Jim?”
“Bad. Reinforcements comin’, Jamie?”
“No,” Jamie said softly. “I don’t think any help will arrive. Think we’re all alone, Micajah.”
Micajah cut his eyes to the hundreds of small fires burning all around them, in the enemy’s camp. “We won’t be for long,” he said dryly.
Cannon fire from the Mexican lines once more began booming, and conversation was impossible. Jamie walked to his station along the wall, where he would fight and, whenever possible, sleep, and took up position.
“Was I you, I believe I’d a kept goin,’ ” a man to his left said sourly.
“Nobody’s holding you here,” Jamie told the older man.
“For a fact,” Louis Moses Rose said. “For a fact.” He spat on the ground and moved off.
Thirty-one
The Third Day
February 25th, 1836
A cannonball crashing against the wall jarred Jamie out of sleep. He opened his eyes to the steel gray of early dawn. Inside the walls, men and women were moving about, tending fires, cooking food, and boiling coffee. Jamie stood up and stretched, getting the kinks out of his joints and muscles. The nights were bitterly cold and few men had ample blankets to keep warm. Jamie walked over to one fire pit and was handed a bowl of chile and beans, some tortillas, and a cup of coffee.
Jamie squatted down and ate his breakfast. On the Mexican side, brass bands were playing loudly. “Quite a concert,” he remarked to a man who sat down on the ground beside him.