The man next to Son had his reins clipped in half by a ball. He stared at the slack leather in his hand, then as he looked quizzically at the breastworks a rose petal burst between his eyes, his jaw fell open, and he toppled sideways from the saddle onto Son’s horse.
“All right, give it to them,” Houston yelled. “Infantry kneel and fire. Kneel and fire. Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!”
The first line of infantry knelt and fired a ragged volley into the breastworks, and a second line rushed into place beside them, knelt in the grass and fired, while the first reloaded. Then they rushed screaming up the slope into the Mexican guns.
Son and Hugh were with Lamar’s cavalry, and they charged the Mexican flank by the marsh. As Son’s horse labored up the incline, he could see the faces of the Mexicans in the smoke behind the breastworks. They were terrified. They were firing too fast and shooting high, and some of them had already started running for the rear. He threw his rifle to his shoulder, aimed at a soldier who was rising from his knees, and pulled the trigger. The ball tore through the soldier’s chest, then Son felt his horse’s hooves clatter over the logs and piled dirt at the top of the embankment.
“Holland’s inside! Damn it, get over the top with him! Ride right over them!” he heard Lamar shout behind him.
The Mexican camp was chaos. Many of the Mexicans had been asleep when the first shots were fired, the cavalry had been watering their horses down by the river, and the ammunition wagons were far back from the breastworks with no oxen yoked to them so that a soldier had to run to the rear when he was out of ammunition. Loose horses and mules galloped in panic through the camp, knocking down tents and stacked rifles and colliding into groups of running men. The Texians poured over the breastworks, swinging their rifles like axes and slashing at heads with swords and bowie knives.
Son felt his horse go out from under him, and he fell headlong on the body of a Mexican soldier. He knelt in the smoke, the ramrod in his teeth, his hands shaking, and tried to pour powder from his horn down the barrel. Thirty yards away he could see two Mexicans aiming at him through the smoke. Then he heard Hugh’s Colt fire three times above him.
“You’ll get killed trying to reload. Get your ass up here,” Hugh said.
Son put his foot in the loose stirrup and swung up on the horse’s rump. To their left they saw a Texian stand back from the Mexican twelve-pounder and throw a burning piece of firewood behind it. “That stupid sonofabitch is blowing the magazine,” Hugh said.
The explosion blew a fountain of dirt, splintered logs, and parts of the dead gunners fifty feet in the air. The cannon lurched forward on its carriage and toppled down the slope.
“Start busting skulls. We’re going right into them,” Hugh said.
Hugh charged his horse into a group of fleeing Mexicans and shot one man through the neck. Son swung his rifle by the barrel with one hand, holding onto Hugh’s waist with the other, and caught a Mexican across the back of the head with the stock. The man fell on his hands and knees, and Hugh jerked the reins around and rode his horse over him.
The Mexicans who had fallen back from the breastworks were now surrounded on all sides with the marsh at their backs. Others, some barefoot, were running across the plain toward Vince’s Bridge. In the clouds of smoke and dust Son saw a man in pantaloons with a head like a cannonball trying to catch up a horse that had a slipped saddle on it.
“It’s him,” he said.
“Damn if it ain’t!” Hugh sawed back the reins, cocked, aimed the Colt with both hands, and yelled out at the same time: “Landry! It’s Hugh Allison!” Then he fired.
“You missed. Shoot again.”
“I’m empty.”
Hugh threw his leg over the horse’s head and dropped to the ground. He tore a rifle out of the hands of a soldier who had just reloaded.
“What the hell are you doing?” the soldier said.
Hugh knelt on one knee and squeezed off the trigger into the drifting smoke. The recoil almost knocked him down. The shot was high, and Emile Landry swung onto the horse and raced down the far slope with the slipped saddle flopping under the horse’s belly. Hugh threw the rifle against the soldier’s chest.
“You dumb bastard. You must have put a half-horn in there,” he said.
Mexicans were stumbling into the marsh, struggling against the sand and soft mud that sank them up to their knees. Many of them couldn’t swim, and as they went deeper into the water toward the river they put their hands high in the air and begged for quarter. But the Texians waded after them, firing point-blank into their faces or bayoneting them as they tried to push away the Texian muskets with their hands. The screams from the marsh were terrible, and the water along the sandy bay was diffused with pink.
The command tent in the center of the camp was still standing. A soldier ripped down the Mexican tricolor flag from the staff and started to tear it under his foot.
“Don’t do that,” Lamar, the cavalry officer, said. “We’ll save it for those who thought we were more jackrabbit than soldier.”
He threw back the flap on the tent. The bedclothes were pulled halfway off the cot, and a small folding night table which had held a water pitcher, a bowl of fruit, and a diary had been knocked into the corner.
“It looks like Santa Anna had him a right expensive siesta,” Hugh said.
“Well, he won’t be hard to find. Just look for the fellow that forgot to put his britches on,” Son said.
They walked back out the tent, and Lamar flung the flap to in disgust.
“Don’t laugh, gentlemen,” he said. “Everything we’ve done here means nothing if Santa Anna escapes from us now.”
The shooting had almost stopped in the marsh, and bodies whose uniforms were puffed with air floated in the dead current and hung in grotesque positions among the tree trunks. But the firing was still heavy on the plain where the Texians were chasing the Mexicans toward Vince’s Bridge. Son and Hugh reloaded their weapons; Son caught up a saddled horse, and they rode down off the slope onto the plain with other cavalry toward Buffalo Bayou.
Green horseflies had already started to hum over the Mexican dead who were scattered over the ground for two miles. Son saw the barefoot body of a man in gray pantaloons and filthy white shirt lying face down in the grass. There was a deep saber slash through his back that exposed his ribs. Son dismounted and turned him over with his foot.
“You know him?” he said.
“I seen him once. He brought some boys into camp in the jail wagon.”
“You two better stop thinking about looting and start popping some caps,” a soldier next to them said. “Houston and Deaf are pushing a whole bunch of them back in the trees by the bayou.”
A Mexican officer had gotten some control over his men and had formed them into a firing line on the edge of the woods. Son and Hugh galloped their horses into Houston’s advancing line, and they could see dozens of Mexicans crouched behind the tree trunks and the dirty puffs of smoke that exploded into the sunlight and flattened in the breeze.
“Where the hell you been?” Deaf said.
“Trying to slip a pig-string on Santa Anna.”
Houston’s horse had five rifle holes in it, and there was a tear in his trousers and a long area of scarlet that ran down his leg.
“General, you’re bleeding like a stuck hog,” Hugh said.
“Move on the trees, boys. They’re almost finished.”
Then his horse collapsed under him. Deaf and Son were immediately on each side of him with their hands under his arms. They pulled him to his feet, and he held his leg stiffly off the ground as though it were set with a splint.