It was barely first light when Deaf squatted before the lean-to and pulled on Son’s boot.
“Get in the saddle,” he said. “You ain’t got time to eat. Just put some biscuits in your poke.”
“What’s going on?” Hugh said.
“We’re riding as close to Bexar as we can.”
“Now, wait a minute, Deaf,” Hugh said.
“I ain’t got time to talk with you. Just get it moving.”
“There might be a few thousand Mexicans down that road.”
“That’s right, and we ain’t going to get caught with our britches hanging in a tree.”
“I thought them Mexicans was supposed to be spies,” Son said.
“Spies, my ass. They’re a couple of farmers,” Deaf said.
They forded the river on a submerged pebble-covered sandbar and rode up through the willows on the other side. It had rained during the night, but now the sky was a clear blue with pink clouds on the horizon and they could feel the early sun on their backs. The live oaks and the blackjack and the grass in the fields were shining with dew, and the rolling countryside ahead looked so beautiful to Son that it seemed impossible to believe that down the trace the mission could be a fire-blackened ruin and all the soldiers he had met in Bexar were dead.
“Deaf, what do you reckon Houston’s going to do if them two Mexicans was right?” he said.
“He already told me. Put a rear guard on Gonzales to get the civilians out and run.”
“When the hell do we stop?”
“When we ain’t got to fight them like they want us to. That’s what Fannin can’t understand. Sam’s ordered him to haul his ass to Victoria before he gets cut up, too. But if I know Fannin he’ll still be thinking about taking Matamoros when the grape starts singing around his ears.”
“You still ain’t answered me.”
“No, and I ain’t got to. Maybe the whole army will get chewed up in pieces before we can turn and make them hurt. But if they can be whupped with what we got, Sam will find the way to do it.”
“We ain’t arguing with you, Deaf,” Hugh said. “It just don’t feel too good to run.”
“He knows that. It don’t feel good to him, either. Some of them sonsofbitches back at Washington-on-the-Brazos is calling him a drunkard and a coward.”
“That ain’t all he’s going to get called when them back at camp hear we’re running,” Son said.
“Them kind ain’t worth a shit nohow, and I just as lief be shut of them,” Deaf said.
That afternoon, as they came out of an oak grove, they saw a white woman and a black man coming toward them on horseback. A second black man walked beside them, and the woman held a little girl in her arms. Her dress was gathered up to her thighs so she could ride like a man, and there was a soiled bandage on her leg. Her clothes were spotted with dried mud, her face windburned, and there was an electric quality in her face that a person with a high fever would have.
“Do you come from Bexar, ma’am?” Deaf said.
She continued to stare at him strangely.
“She don’t understand Deaf’s voice,” Son said.
“You’re coming from Bexar, ain’t you, ma’am?” Hugh said.
“Yes. They are all killed there.”
“Well, you let me hold that little girl a piece. I bet your arms is plumb wore out,” Hugh said.
He dismounted and started to take the child from her, but her arms were rigid.
“It’s all right. We’re with Sam Houston’s army at Gonzales,” he said. “We’re going to rest a bit and then take you there.”
“Why didn’t you come? They waited on the walls for you each morning.”
“Let’s go back to the trees where you can rest,” Hugh said, with the child on his shoulder. “I got some biscuits in my poke, and I’m going to warm them up for this little one.”
“Where’s Santa Anna at?” Deaf said to the black man on horseback.
“They coming on the trace. We seen their fires way off one night.”
“How many fires?”
The man shook his head.
“Was there a lot or just a few?”
The man was afraid to answer. Instead, he reached inside his shirt and handed Deaf a waxen brown envelope sealed with a melted candle. As they rode back toward the oak trees Deaf opened the letter in his fingers.
“It’s in Spanish,” Son said.
“That’s because it’s from Santa Anna himself. Wait till Sam sees this.”
“What’s it say?”
“He’ll pardon any Texian that lays down his arms. Otherwise, we all get the same they got at the Alamo.”
“I reckon the general will find a use for that paper,” Hugh said.
Hugh built a fire of twigs in the trees and browned his biscuits on a sharpened stick for the woman and the little girl. The woman said her name was Susannah Dickerson, the wife of Lieutenant Almeron Dickerson, one of the last to die in the mission. Then she told the story of the eleven-day siege and the final attack at dawn on March 6 that left all one hundred and eighty-eight Texians dead and fifteen hundred Mexican casualties.
The Mexican artillery pounded the walls for days, and each time a breach was made and the Texians had to repair it the Mexicans loaded with grape and moved their cannon closer until they were less than three hundred yard from the plaza. The sharpshooters on the wall devastated the Mexican infantry whenever they tried to move their line forward, but the barrage continued without respite through the day, and each night there were more and more campfires surrounding the mission as Santa Anna received re-enforcements. The plaza was filled with craters and strewn with exploded rubble, and by the afternoon of March 5 the smoke was so thick from the Mexican cannons that the Texians could barely see the thousands of troops waiting on four sides of them.
Travis assembled the men and told them that no help was coming, their hours were probably short, and that any man who wished could surrender and ask for quarter or try to get through the Mexican lines. That night a man named Louis Rose dropped over the north wall.
As the first light touched the hills the next morning they heard the Deguello blow, then the Mexicans attacked in waves as far as the eye could see. The Texians loaded their cannons with chopped horseshoes, nails, and trace chains, and cut huge holes in the Mexican advance. But their ranks closed again, and they kept coming through the smoke with their bayonets fixed while the gunners on top of the church worked furiously to depress their cannon and reload.
The sharpshooters on the wall fired pointblank into the Mexicans’ faces and clubbed and stabbed at their heads and threw back their ladders. Then the earthen works by the church were blown apart and they poured into the plaza, screaming with the adrenaline of having lived through the initial attack. Travis was dead with a ball through the brain, and Crockett and the other survivors from the walls were running for the barracks by the church. The gunners on top of the church turned their cannon around and fired into the breached earthen works. The Mexicans caught there were shredded with hundreds of nails. Then the breach was filled with screaming men again, and the gunners were cut down with a fusillade of rifle balls as they tried to swab out their cannon with buckets of water.
Crockett and three others were hacked to pieces against the barracks wall. The Mexicans burst through the barracks door and found Jim Bowie on his cot. He fired a derringer into the face of a sergeant, then a dozen bayonets entered his body almost simultaneously.
When the shooting had stopped the Mexicans found five Texians who had tried to hide. They were taken before Santa Anna and then executed. The bodies of the Texians were stacked in the plaza, with mesquite brush under each layer of dead, and burned. The fire lasted until morning, and a sweet-sickening smell hung over Bexar for two days.