Forty-six
Little Wolf crawled to his knees and staggered toward the river to splash water on his wounds and try to bandage them. Then he would return and take the scalp of Jamie MacCallister. He made the river only to pass out again. He lay with his legs in the cold water and his upper torso on the bank.
Jamie opened his eyes to a world of pain. It was full daylight and the sun was bright. About eight o’clock, he guessed. He did not try to pry the dead fingers of Tall Bull from the hilt of the knife. He doubted he had the strength left in him to do that and then pull the blade from his side. He gritted his teeth, summoned all his strength and willpower, put one hand around Tall Bull’s wrist and the other around the dead Indian’s closed hand, and jerked.
He screamed and passed out from the pain.
By the river, Little Wolf stirred at the sound, but could not drag himself to consciousness.
Jamie pulled himself back to white-hot awareness and pushed Tall Bull from him. He did not yet have the strength to stand, so after gathering his pistols and rifle, he began the painful crawl back to his camp. Twice he had to stop and rest. At his camp, he built up the fire and dressed his wounds as best he could with what he had and could find, the latter provided by nature.
He forced himself to eat and drink some coffee and then, working in stages, for he was very weak, he packed up and saddled up. His horse did not like the smell of blood, but Jamie quieted the animal and got the saddle on him. Next came the task of getting himself into the saddle. After three tries, all of them hideously painful, he made it.
He pointed the nose of the horse north, toward the road. He was very tired, and wanted very much to just lie down and rest. But he knew if he allowed that, he would not get up. He would just die.
How he stayed in the saddle for as long as he did was something short of a miracle. He was only half conscious much of the time. When he reached the road, he turned east and ran right into a Mexican patrol. Through the painful haze behind his eyes, he saw them and lifted his rifle. It seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. The Mexican patrol literally blew him out of the saddle. Jamie was unconscious before he hit the ground. He was not aware of the gentle rain that started falling from the clouds. It was a warm rain, and it signaled the beginning of spring.
Jamie lay sprawled on his face and belly in a ditch by the side of the road. His horse had raced off as soon as Jamie was shot out of the saddle. Two of the Mexican cavalrymen tried to catch the animal, but the horse was too fast for them and they gave up.
Jamie was covered with blood from his newly received head wound to his knees, and the officer took one careless glance at him and said, “Dead.”
Jamie had been carrying the pouch on the outside of his coat to prevent any blood from leaking through and the Mexican officer ripped it from him and pawed through the letters. He could read and speak English and he saw quickly that there were no military dispatches among the bits of torn paper. He shook his head and cursed and threw the papers on the dampening ground and swung back into the saddle.
He looked over at Jamie’s horse, about a half mile away, grazing. “Too bad,” he said. “That was a fine animal. I would have liked to have caught him.”
The patrol galloped off, toward San Antonio, as the rain began turning the ink on the papers once more into liquid.
* * *
Kate straightened up from her work and looked westward. An almost physical stab of fear had suddenly filled her. She clutched at her breast and gasped. What was wrong with her? She’d never before experienced anything like this.
Jamie Ian and Ellen Kathleen, now in their ninth year, and both very bright and quick, looked at their mother and then at each other. Ellen shook her head at her brother.
Andy blurted, “Are you all right, Mommy?”
Kate turned from the stove and forced a smile. “Yes. I’m fine. Get me some potatoes, will you, Andy?” She looked out the kitchen window. Sarah and Hannah were walking up the path, coming over for afternoon coffee and conversation. The men were in the fields.
Kate took a deep breath and calmed herself. She just couldn’t understand that sudden moment of anxiety. It was gone now. She sighed and took the potatoes Andy handed her and thanked him. She had to smile as she looked at the children. Everyone of them blond and blue-eyed. The boys all looked like Jamie and the girls all looked like Kate.
Kate stepped to the door to greet her friends. What’s happening, Jamie? she thought. What is going on where you are? Are you safe? Well? This waiting is becoming harder and harder to bear. Come back to me, Jamie. Come back to me.
* * *
San Antonio was very quiet. Over at the Alamo, ashes from the funeral pyres were cold. All that remained of over one hundred and eighty men were a few teeth and some bones that had managed to survive the intense fires.
When asked what he wanted done with the ashes of the defenders, Santa Anna said, “I really don’t care. Let someone else worry about it.”
No one really knows what happened to the ashes of the men who fought so gallantly and died at the Alamo.
* * *
A Mexican family found Jamie. The man was getting a shovel from the wagon when his wife screamed. He ran to her side.
“He moved!” she said. “His hand. His hand moved.”
“Impossible, woman! The man is dead. Madre Dios, look at him!”
“I tell you his hand moved.”
The man knelt down in the rain beside the sprawled body. He recoiled in shock when he saw Jamie’s eyelids flutter. He looked up at his wife. “This is truly a miracle. He’s alive!”
Jamie’s horse had wandered over. The woman tied the reins to the back of the wagon and then she and her husband struggled to drag Jamie over to the wagon. It took them three tries to get him into the bed of the wagon, for Jamie was a big man.
“I wonder what happened to him?” she asked, when they were on their way.
“Bandits, surely,” the husband replied. “This is a dangerous road.”
Neither of them knew anything of the fight at the Alamo.
“What are we going to do with him?” she asked.
“Give him the dignity of dying on a pallet with a roof over his head. We can’t leave him for the coyotes and the buzzards. That would be a sin.”
At their farm, the man and woman and their children carried Jamie into the house and undressed him. They all gasped when they saw his fearsome wounds, then set about tending to him. When they had done all they could do, they covered Jamie and sat at the table, looking at him.
“It’s in the hands of God now,” the woman said.
“I wish the priest would come by. He would know what to do.”
The man wasn’t nearly as devout as his wife, but he wisely made no comment. He rose from the table to see to Jamie’s horse. When the horse was stabled and rubbed down and fed, the man gathered up Jamie’s weapons, unloaded them, and cleaned them of mud and blood.
He and his wife had carefully cleaned the wounds, then stopped the new bleeding with cayenne pepper. They applied poultices to the wounds and then sat back and waited for Jamie to die. The man and his wife had done all they knew to do.
* * *
It would be days, in some cases, even weeks, before all the Anglos in Texas knew what had taken place at the Alamo. While Jamie lay hovering between life and death, sometimes conscious enough to drink herbal tea brewed by the Mexican woman, Houston was putting together and pulling together his Texas army.
When Mrs. Susanna Dickerson was found by Houston’s scouts, she told them what had happened at the Alamo and also that General Santa Anna had ordered a detachment of his troops to march to Gonzales and either drive out or kill all Americans.
A pall settled over the tiny town of Gonzales. The entire force of Texans at the Alamo had been killed and their bodies burned. But soon despair turned to outrage and cold fury. Who in the hell did Santa Anna think he was to treat human beings in such a manner? To mutilate and butcher and then burn the bodies like so much garbage. Goddamn the man!
“We retreat,” Houston said, and then waited for the howls of protest to die down. “We have no choice in the matter. Send a rider to Goliad and order Colonel Fannin to pull out and link up with us... here.” He pointed to a crude map. “Tell him to destroy the fort and get the hell out of there. And tell him that by God I want this order obeyed!”
A rider was immediately dispatched to Goliad, to Fannin at Fort Defiance.
Houston immediately had Gonzales evacuated. His plan was to fall back across the Colorado River. The rain that had started a few days earlier fell in abundance now, turning the poor roads into roads of mud. The soldiers and the frightened refugees had a very tough time of it, but they made the Colorado with Santa Anna’s troops right behind them. Houston’s men crossed the river just before it poured over its banks and flooded everything. A full Mexican division was looking at him from the west side of the river. Houston was counting on Fannin for help, and wondered where in the hell the man was.
But Fannin once more had difficulty in making up his mind. He decided to delay leaving Fort Defiance. That decision would cost him his life and the lives of his men. When he finally decided to abandon the fort, he got some four or five miles outside of Goliad and found himself looking at about two thousand Mexican soldiers, under the command of General Urrea. Fannin had slightly over four hundred men under his command. He ordered his wagons circled and made his stand. They fought for several days, killing over three hundred Mexican troops, but finally had to surrender. There was no hope left. Urrea assured Fannin he and his men would be treated fairly and humanely.
A week after Fannin surrendered, on a Sunday morning, Fannin and his men were taken outside of Goliad and shot... on orders from Santa Anna. The thirty or so badly injured men, unable to march out of town, were carried outside the makeshift hospital and also executed.
* * *
When the news of the slaughter at Goliad began leaking out over the countryside, many of the civilians went into a panic, quickly packing a few possessions, and taking off for safer ground.
Nearly three weeks had passed since the fall of the Alamo, and the news had finally reached Kate and the others living in the Big Thicket country just east of San Augustine. She was devastated; but she could not bring herself to believe that Jamie’s ashes were among those scattered to the wind around the Alamo. She knew her Jamie, and knew that among his virtues was the ability to survive.
“Kate,” Sam Montgomery told her, as the month of March drew to a close. “You’ve got to accept it. Jamie is gone.”
“No!”
“Kate, Kate, I don’t like it, either. I’m heartsick at just the thought. But there were no survivors.”
Kate looked up at the sounds of a lone horseman making his way up the lane. It was the man who ran the livery in San Augustine. He dismounted and took off his hat. “Ma’am,” he said. “Sam. I got news. Some of the women that was in the Alamo is talking. They say that just hours before the fall, Colonel Travis sent out a man with a pouch full of messages from the defenders. They said it was Jamie MacCallister.”
Kate’s heart swelled and she nearly swooned. Sam steadied her arm and she leaned against him.
“How straight is this news?” Sam asked.
“Pretty straight, Sam. And the patrol that found Susanna Dickerson said they come up on a place where there had been one hell of fight ’tween somebody and some Shawnees.”
“Shawnees?” Kate asked. “There are no Shawnees near San Antonio.”
“Well, not many, leastways,” the liveryman replied. “Anyhow, whoever is was that fought these Shawnees killed more than his share, according to the patrol. They counted eleven bodies. All Injun.”
“And the white man?” Sam asked. “Assuming it was a white man; what about him?”
“Not a trace, Sam. Looks like he got away clean.”
“Did not,” the heavy voice spoke from behind them, startling them all.
They whirled around. It was the huge Cherokee, Egg. He had slipped up on them as silently as a snake.
“Get wagon,” the Cherokee enforcer said. “Pack provisions for a long trip. I will take you to your man.”
“He’s alive?” Kate cried.
“Yes. Badly hurt. Long way off.”
“I’ll go with you, Kate,” Sam said.
“You stay here,” Egg told him firmly, in a tone that Sam had learned meant the subject was closed. “No one will bother us. I have man with me to drive wagon. We leave in one hour.” He looked at Kate. “No more faint. You must be strong. Move!”
* * *
Houston now had about a thousand men. He could never be sure because of the desertions and new additions that were arriving every day. Houston formed a cavalry unit, and assigned men to man the cannon, of which he had six, all mounted.
Meanwhile, Santa Anna had left San Antonio and joined up with General Sesma. It made for an awesome force of trained, combat-experienced soldiers. Santa Anna felt confident that this time, he would drive every American out of Texas... or kill them where they stood.
Then he made a fatal mistake.
He split up his huge army into several groups. He sent over twelve hundred troops to the south, about nine hundred to the north, and he took personal command of a select group of infantry and cavalry and crossed the Colorado river — his objective was San Felipe.
That move was to be Santa Anna’s Waterloo.
* * *
On April 21st, 1836, Kate arrived at the home of the Mexican couple who had cared for Jamie. On that same date, far to the east, Houston and his army were preparing to meet Santa Anna’s troops in the battle that would turn the tide for Texas independence.
Kate knelt down beside the wasted body of her husband and let her tears bathe his face. Jamie was alive and conscious, but his hideous wounds had ravaged him. He had lost about seventy-five pounds and was only a shell of what he had once been.
But he was alive.
Kate pressed a hundred dollars in gold coin into the hands of the Mexican couple. They gasped at the money. That was a small fortune. They had never seen so much money. They tried to return it, but Kate would have none of that.
“I wish I had more to give you,” she told them in Spanish. “You have done so much. I could never repay you all that I owe you.”
Jamie was so weak he could scarcely speak. For the fevers, more than his wounds, had nearly killed him. Egg picked him up in his arms and carried him to the wagon — the bed had been filled with straw — and gently placed the man on the softness.
“Now we go home,” the huge Cherokee said.