“How’s he run an army?”
“From what I hear he’s an old fox. He must be if Santa Anna ain’t caught him yet and dropped him off a tree.”
“Hugh, you ever think about putting it down in one place?”
“What?”
“I mean your own place. Not doing nothing for nobody else, just yourself.”
“Anything I ever done was for myself. But what you’re talking about is something else. That’s why you come down the river to New Orleans. You had a notion of being one of them French dandies down at the cotton exchange. You seen what that got you. Them gentlemen in the courtroom put a little snuff up their nose and sent your ass to prison. The only place for the likes of us is rolling free so they can’t get a chain on our leg. And that don’t change no matter where you’re at. Once this revolution is over, Texas won’t be no different than back in the United States. They’ll have a rule for everything and a manacle to go with it.”
“You was in jail because you killed a man.”
“But you wasn’t. And I gone to prison before just like you. They should have hung me for what I done with the Harpes, but I always got in the worst trouble for stinking up the air around gentlemen. That’s something Jim Bowie understood. When he come down to New Orleans he learned to dress and talk just like them. But they always knowed he’d slit their noses if they didn’t address him proper.”
Late that afternoon they stopped their horses in a stand of oaks on a hilltop overlooking miles of meadowland. In the distance they could see where the trace disappeared into more trees and then a hazy line of green hills beyond.
“Tyler’s place is probably beyond that next rise, ain’t it?” Son said.
“I hope it is. My butt feels like somebody put a dirk up it.”
“Five dollars a head, right? We’re going to be rich if Landry ain’t there.”
“You watch out for Jack, though. He’s got a way of putting it back in his purse.”
“I don’t plan on getting drunk on his corn or fooling with none of them jenny-barners.”
“We need saddles, food, powder, and a shit pile of other things if we’re going on to Bexar and don’t want to keep looking like convicts. That shirt of yours smells like something died inside it. You might not know it, but living in an Indian camp gives you a stink that makes a white person’s nose fall off, and that dried blood don’t help it none.”
“I’ll be damned. Lookie yonder,” Son said.
Hugh leaned forward on his horse and squinted with his walleye through the failing light.
“She must have poured it on that gelding,” he said. “You see anybody behind her?”
“Not unless they’re coming out of them trees.”
“I got to admit: an Indian can get forty miles out of a horse when a white man can’t get twenty. You sure you don’t see nothing behind her?”
“There ain’t nothing behind her except a shadow.”
Five minutes later the woman walked the gelding into the oak trees. Its neck and flanks were covered with foam and its rib cage quivered under the touch of her heels. The woman’s face was drained with exhaustion, and perspiration rolled in drops out of her black hair. She pushed herself back on the gelding’s rump and dropped the knotted reins on its neck. Her exposed thighs were shaking.
“What’d Jack say?” Hugh asked.
“You can drink at the saloon all night on credit.”
“He didn’t see no Frenchmen there?” Hugh said.
“He say you come in and drink.”
“Was there any foreign-looking people around? Men that look like they don’t belong around here?”
“She done told you, Hugh. Don’t talk to her like she’s a child.”
“Well, shit then, our luck has changed in another direction. I’m going to buy you all a supper tonight that would make the king of England piss in his slippers. I can’t believe we got a chance to be free white people again.”
It was dusk when they reached the settlement, and the cold twilight lay in a purple band on the rolling horizon. The road that led between Jack Tyler’s saloon and stock barns and a store on the opposite side was scarred with wagon and horse tracks, and there were at least a dozen horses tethered in front of the saloon. Son’s eyes moved over each saddle and gum coat or blanket roll tied across the horses’ rumps.
“You see anything that don’t smell right?” he said.
“None of them saddles is French. Quit worrying,” Hugh said.
The saloon was built of split and notched logs with a raised porch, and the shuttered windows glowed with the yellow light of the oil lamps inside.
“I wish I had a load in this rifle,” Son said.
“They wouldn’t try to arrest us in there, nohow. I bet most of the boys drinking in there are Tennessee and Kentucky, and they ain’t going to let a bunch of Frenchies arrest nobody in their place.”
The two of them slipped off their horses and stepped up on the porch, but the woman stayed behind.
“Come on,” Son said.
“The Americans don’t want Indians,” she said.
“You was in here this afternoon, wasn’t you?” Hugh said. “They ain’t going to eat you.”
“I wait.”
“No, you ain’t,” Son said, and took her by the arm and led her with him.
They pushed open the oak door and stepped into the heavy warmth of the room and the smell of stale tobacco smoke, wine, raw whiskey, and men’s bodies. A fire was burning in a hearth made of field stones, and a black pot filled with chicken stew was boiling in the center of the logs. The long square tables were filled with men dressed in animal skins or colorless sweat-faded eastern clothes. Their unshaved faces were red with windburn and alcohol, and many of them wore pistols or knives on their chests. Son felt strange at being around so many white people who were not convicts. Then he noticed the women at the tables.
He had never seen women in a saloon before, except in New Orleans and they were mulattoes. But these were white and Mexican women, and they were as drunk as the men with them. His father, who had been a religious man, once told him about a saloon in Nashville that had jenny-barners working in it, and his father had said he hoped Son would never allow his body to be corrupted by women who had Satan’s diseases inside them.
A Mexican woman in a dirty white blouse with snuff stains on her lips sat on a hogshead behind the long plank that served as a counter.
“Where’s Jack Tyler at?” Hugh said, loudly.
“In the back,” she said.
“Tell him to get his dirty bum out here. My name is Hugh Allison, and I want three cups of that wine you’re setting on.”
“Fifteen American cents for each cup,” she said.
“You just serve it up and get Jack.”
“Fifteen cents for each.”
“I ain’t going to have to go around there and serve myself, am I? You put it right here on the board and tell that old sonofabitch to haul it out here.”
“Slow it down,” Son said, and leaned his rifle against the plank. He looked around at the men who were now watching the three of them.
“Ah, now there’s our wine. I thank you, ma’am, because this is surely a gentleman’s cup. Once, Jim Bowie and me and two other fellows from Kentucky drank a whole cask of this down on Congo Square in New Orleans. We got so drunk we set a cotton bale on fire, and Jim was going to roast one of them Frenchy gendarmes for breakfast.”
The Mexican woman had disappeared behind the burlap curtain at the back of the room. The men at the tables had stopped talking and were looking intently at Hugh.
“You know James Bowie, mister?” One man said. He wore a gray flop hat over an enormous head, and his hands looked like frying pans. There was a large knife and a cap and ball pistol in a double holster on his chest.