“Leave as soon as you finish your breakfast.”
“I never knowed no Irishman to side with a tyrant, mister,” Hugh said. “You must be a different breed from the ones I fought alongside with at Chalmette.”
“You finish and get out.”
Hugh chewed a large piece of fatback in his mouth and spit it into his plate.
“We done finished, mister,” he said. “And before you walk away sniffing at the air like there’s a bad smell in it, think about what it’s going to be like if Sam Houston and Jim Bowie win this thing. My point is a fellow in a pretty shawl and dress like that ought not to be flinging his slop jar into the wind.”
They rode laughing down the front road between the sunlit fields, the wind in their faces, while the overseer and the slaves pulling stumps stared after them curiously.
They wandered for weeks through the hill country of south central Texas, across the Colorado and the Guadalupe and over toward San Antonio de Bexar, then south on the Guadalupe again. The rolling hills and steep cliffs were the largest Son had seen since he left Tennessee. The pebble-bottomed streams were a clear green, and the banks were covered with cottonwoods and willows. Sometimes when they rode along a natural fault where they could see miles of the country at once, his head would swim with the enormous breadth and diversity of the horizon. The rocky ground was dotted with live oaks and blackjack and mesquite trees, and there were chains of lakes that sloped away toward another wide green river that cut its way through canyon walls that a ground squirrel couldn’t climb.
Once they got within twenty miles of Bexar and were told that Ben Milam’s men had taken the town for the Texians, although a ball had been driven through Milam’s brain on the third day of the battle. They almost decided to ride into the town because Hugh thought James Bowie was there, but they still had a terrible question mark left from the slave hunter’s story about Emile Landry’s promise to pay a reward in Bexar.
They found Sam Houston and his army outside of Gonzales on the Guadalupe River. It was mid-morning and raining hard, and they saw the tents and lean-to shelters spread through a piney woods. The rain was sluicing off their hat brims and driving into their faces as they tried to focus through the gray light on the woods and estimate the number of men camped there.
“It sure don’t look like a lot,” Hugh said.
“You reckon that’s just part of it?” Son said.
“I hope so, because I wouldn’t want to be here if Santa Anna come marching with a thousand or so Mexicans up the pike.”
“Stand and say who you are, mister,” a picket called out from the edge of the trees.
“They sure don’t put their pickets out too far,” Hugh said.
“You better sing the right song, mister, or I’m going to put a ball through your eye,” the picket yelled.
“Who the hell do we look like, the king and queen of England?” Hugh shouted.
There was no response from the woods, and in the waving sheets of rain they still couldn’t make out where the voice had come from. Son stood forward in his stirrups and cupped his hands over his mouth.
“We want to join up with you. We got our own guns and grub,” he said.
“Ride in,” the picket replied.
“They’re a choicy bunch of sonsofbitches, ain’t they?” Hugh said.
“Take it easy today, Hugh. Don’t see how many people you can get mad at us our first day in the army.”
“They’re damn glad to have us, boy, and don’t forget it. I bet there ain’t hardly any of these men that knows anything about soldiering. I learned more against the redcoats at Chalmette than this bunch could put together between them.”
They rode into the shelter of the trees and saw the picket walk out from behind a short earthen works shored up with sawed pine logs. He wore deerskin clothes, Indian moccasins, and a flop hat, and carried a Kentucky rifle in his hands. His eyes were like agate as he looked at them.
“Where you come from?” he said.
“We been up on the Brazos with the Indians a bit, and then we wandered all over the hill country looking for you all,” Hugh said. “I never seen an army that could lose itself so well.”
“I don’t mean that. Where you come from?” the picket asked.
“Kentucky and Tennessee,” Son said. “What the hell difference does it make?”
“You seen any Mexicans?”
“Just get your thumb off the hammer a minute and we’ll tell you,” Hugh said.
“We ain’t seen none since we left the Brazos,” Son said.
“You see that wide tent yonder?” the picket said. “Take your horses over there and don’t get down till I tell you.”
“We went to a lot of trouble to find you, and we ain’t in the mood for playing no games out in a wet woods,” Hugh said.
“General Houston don’t let nobody sign up till he talks with them first,” the picket said.
They walked their horses over the thick layer of pine needles on the forest floor. Dripping tree limbs swung back against their faces, and unshaved soldiers in buckskin and homespun clothes looked out at them from the gloom of their tents and lean-tos. The smoke from the few camp fires flattened in the drizzle through the trees and hung low on the ground. The picket walked to the flap of the wide tent that was hung on two ropes crisscrossed between four pine trunks.
“General, this is Corporal Burnett. There’s two fellows out here that say they’re from Tennessee and Kentucky and want to join up.”
“Send them in, please.”
“Yes, sir.” The picket untied the leather thong from the tent pole and pulled back the flap, then looked up into the rain. “You all go in.”
Son and Hugh got down from their horses and stepped inside the warmth and dryness of the tent. Sam Houston sat behind a table made from a half dozen board planks nailed across the tops of two pine stumps. His hair was grown down on his shoulders and hung in curls on his brow; because of his narrow shoulders and the lack of color in his thin lips he looked almost effeminate to Son at first glance, until Son looked again at the wide forehead and the deep-set eyes that were either hazel or gray (he couldn’t tell which) and stared at him as steadily as a cocked musket. He wore a navy coat with large buttons on each side of the front, and a blanket was draped around the back of his chair. A pewter container of ink with a stained quill in it was set on top of an unfinished letter in front of him. In the moment’s hush after the picket had fastened the flap behind him, Son felt not only his own but also Hugh’s sudden lack of preparation in front of this very different man.
“I understand you gentlemen want to join the army,” Houston said. The voice was Tennessee, from the mountains, with the soft and deceptive inflection of the Cumberland men whom Son and Hugh had known all their lives.
“Yes, sir, General,” Hugh said. “We been hunting you all over God’s green earth. We done give up when somebody told us you was right outside Gonzales.”
“Why do you want to join the army?” The eyes never blinked with the question, as though it were something very natural to ask with the rain ticking on the canvas roof like a bad watch running out of time.
“The way things are now, you either got to get in the army or have the Mexicans shooting at you half the time, anyway,” Hugh said.
Son looked directly at the general’s eyes and saw that the words never touched inside. “We heared you was giving six hundred and forty acres to any soldier that would stick it out to the end,” he said.
“You can get more than that from the Mexicans just by signing an oath of allegiance to Mexico City,” Houston said.