That night they broke camp on the Guadalupe and began to retreat eastward. They spiked two brass cannons and sank them in the river, loaded their wagons until the wheel rims sank to the spokes in the sand, and put a rear guard on Gonzales to protect the civilian evacuation. The rear guard was told to burn any supplies that could be used by the Mexicans, but instead they burned the whole town. The long column of horses, wagons, soldiers on foot, and escaping families wound through the dark woods, creek beds, and flooded bottoms, and Houston rode up and down the line, talking quietly to frightened children, calling men who had enlisted only a few days earlier by name, and dismounting to push on a wagon when it became mired in a slough. Throughout the night they could still see the glow of the fires in Gonzales. Toward dawn Houston noticed that the last supply wagon in the column had fallen far back in the rear and that the riders around it were swaying in the saddle.
“Allison and Holland, come with me,” he said.
They galloped along the column to the wagon. The two teamsters in the wagon-box had been members of the rear guard, and their eyelids were half-shut and their faces white. The riders were in equally bad condition, grinning and nodding stupidly at Houston.
“I see you gentlemen managed to save the whiskey before you burned the town,” he said.
“We figured they’d be sick people that could use it, General,” one rider said.
“I’m glad you men had the welfare of others in mind. Now chop up all those barrels.”
“Some of it’s Spanish rum, General.”
“That’s good. Only the best should go into the soil of the republic.”
Hugh dismounted, picked up a barrel over his head, and smased the staves apart against a rock.
“My heart’s leaking, too, boys,” he said. “That smell sure does bring back a lot of wonderful nights, don’t it?”
They burst barrels all over the ground and trees until their moccasins and boots were soaking in liquor. Houston watched from his horse with a handkerchief contianing hartshorn held to his nose. Hugh was laughing, his face and hair beaded with drops of whiskey.
“Is it that bad, General?” he said.
“I’m afraid that it is, Hugh.”
For two weeks the retreat continued, through Burnham’s Crossing, Beason’s Ferry, San Felipe, and finally to Groce’s Landing on the Brazos River. Houston refused to tell his men or even his junior officers when he planned to turn and fight, and at night the anger and the doubt toward him grew around the camp fires.
Then two riders came into camp and told what happened to James Fannin and his men at Goliad.
They had been caught in the open six miles out of town by one thousand of General Urrea’s troops. They overturned their wagons, shot their horses for cover, threw up earthen works, and fought for two days without water until they were pulling nails from their wagon boards to fire in their muskets. Fannin surrendered, and was told that his men would be paroled, marched to the coast, and placed on a ship for New Orleans.
“It was early Palm Sunday morning when they come in the presidio and started picking up our blankets,” one of the riders said. He was a tall mountain man dressed in buckskin, with an old scar across his nose and two fingers missing from his right hand. “We should have figured then what they was up to. I asked this one Mexican to let me keep my blanket, and he said you won’t need it no more. They marched three hundred and fifty of us out on the road, and left Colonel Fannin and about seventy other wounded in the presidio. Just before I went out the gate I seen the colonel setting by a fire with a stick twisted through the bandage on his leg. He said, ‘Don’t you worry none, Will. We’ll be having a drink together in New Orleans next week.’
“All along the road there was Mexican women saying, ‘Pobrecitos. Pobrecitos.’ Then them sonsofbitches told us to kneel down. The fellow next to me says, ‘I’ll be damned if I’ll kneel before a greaser,’ and then somebody hollers, ‘Run for it, boys. They’re going to shoot us.’ Their guns was going off all around us. They was firing so close to us I could feel the powder stinging my skin. People was crying out to Jesus and hunched up on the ground with their arms over their heads. The face of that boy next to me just exploded all over my chest. I don’t know how I done it, but I run right over a Mexican and kept on a-going till I hit the woods. Behind me they was gigging the wounded with their pig stickers. I could hear them screaming a half mile into the trees.
“About an hour later I heared shooting start again back at the presidio. It didn’t last long this time, though. Most of them poor boys was already hurt so bad they couldn’t do nothing but lie there.”
Houston heard that Santa Anna was preparing to cross the Brazos south of him, and he sent Deaf, Son, and Hugh down the river toward Fort Bend. Spring was taking hold of the land; the new grass was green in the fields, and the first wild flowers grew along the creek banks. The mornings were still cool, but by noon the sun was warm, and there was a smell in the air of pine rosin and plowed acreage.
At San Felipe they picked up the rutted wagon and hoof tracks of the Mexican advance, but because the Mexicans marched in a long double file and had been driving cattle with them, it was impossible to estimate the size of their force. North of Fort Bend, they entered a pine woods on a low crest above the river, and Deaf swung down from his horse and felt the ashes in a dead camp fire.
“They ain’t far,” he said. “Let’s walk them. Don’t shoot at nothing, even if you step on one’s face.”
“I don’t know about that, Deaf,” Son said.
“You drop a hammer in here and you won’t live fifteen minutes. You ever kill a man with a knife?”
“I have,” Hugh said. “There ain’t nothing to it. You just give it to them in the rib cage, twist once, and you’re out.”
“Good,” Deaf said.
They walked on through the woods, leading their horses, and down the slope they could see the Brazos floating high over its banks into the willow trees. Deaf stopped raised his hand, and remained motionless. Then he turned, held up two fingers, and tethered his horse to a pine trunk. Neither Son nor Hugh could see anything through the trees. They stooped low and crept forward over the pine needles, with Deaf in the lead. Son smelled tobacco smoke.
In a short clearing they saw two Mexican privates with their backs turned to them. They had leaned their muskets against a tree, and one of them was smoking a pipe. They were watching a flatboat on the river that was out of control in the current. Deaf pulled his bowie knife out of the deerskin scabbard on his leg and pointed at the Mexican on the right for Hugh and Son. Then they crashed out of the brush together into the clearing.
Deaf drove his knife all the way to the hilt into the back of the picket’s neck so that the point came out the throat. A bloody clot exploded from the picket’s mouth, his body shook in a convulsion, and he slipped forward off the knife as though he had been disemboweled. The second man had been quicker when he heard the brush rattle, and had run for his musket. Hugh swung his knife at him, but the man arched his back away from the blade and the point caught only the cloth of his jacket. But Son ran toward him at the same time with his rifle butt held up like a pike and drove it into the man’s ear. The man spun around in a pirouette, off balance, and Son hit him twice more as though he were hammering a nail into wood.
“Go down, you sonofabitch,” he said.
Deaf stabbed his knife into the picket’s back and lifted on the handle at the same time.
“Take their guns. They can use them back at camp,” he said.
“Them Mexicans sure got hard heads, ain’t they?” Hugh said.
Son was still breathing hard.
“I wonder why he didn’t holler out,” he said.