The Furies Read Free Page A

Almost miraculously, not a man had been seriously injured during the thirteen-day siege. But things would be entirely different when the enemy launched a direct attack on the walls. The Mexicans had rifles with bayonets and, presumably, ample ammunition. The personal armament of the Americans consisted of squirrel guns, pistols, tomahawks and knives. And powder and shot were running low inside the mission. Some of the Alamo cannons had fired rocks and hacked-up horseshoes in the past couple of days—
    Given all that, the Americans remained in reasonably good spirits. They managed to act contemptuous of Santa Anna’s nightly artillery bombardment, and made bawdy jests about the midnight band music. It struck her that, with Louis Rose gone, there wasn’t one man who could truly be called a professional soldier.
    She knew of four lawyers among the hundred and eighty. There was a physician—Dr. Pollard, who attended Bowie. Bill Garnett, only twenty-four, was an ordained Baptist minister. Micajah Autry, one of the Tennesseans whom Crockett had brought in, wrote passable poetry. There were several men from England and Ireland, even another Rose—first name James—who claimed he was ex-President Madison’s nephew. Most had been lured to the southwest by the promise of new land, a second chance. In the border states, it was said, many a man simply shut his cabin door, carved or chalked G.T.T. —Gone to Texas—on it, and walked away.
    Some of the more recent arrivals, though, had come in direct response to appeals by the Texans for help in resisting the Mexican dictator. Crockett was one of those. He’d marched into Bexar in February, with a dozen sharpshooters tramping along behind him. There was not only the promise of a fight here, he said, but maybe a new start afterward—and that he needed. His anti-Jacksonian politics had caused his defeat in his most recent run for Congress. In a fury, Crockett had told his constituents, “You can go to hell—I’m going to Texas.” In the Alamo, he joked about getting the worst end of the bargain.
    She saw him now as she approached the entrance to the baptistry at the chapel’s southwest corner. A lean man, Crockett was seated on a stool beside the cot where Bowie lay, his pneumonia-wasted face lit by a lantern on the floor. The tail of Crockett’s coon cap hung down over the back of his sweat-blackened hide shirt. His shoulders moved, but Amanda couldn’t see what he was doing.
    Bowie didn’t hear her approach. His bleary eyes were fixed on Crockett’s hands, which finally became visible to Amanda from the doorway. The Tennessean was ramming a charge into one of the relatively new percussion-cap pistols. Another, matching pistol lay in Bowie’s lap, alongside the nine-inch hilted knife that had given the big, sandy-haired Colonel of Volunteers the reputation as a dangerous man, a killer. Jim Bowie hardly fitted that description now, she thought sadly.
    Crockett turned. So did Bowie’s black slave, Sam, who squatted in a corner, his young face showing strain. In a moment Crockett stood up. Like Bowie, he was exceptionally tall. Not bad-looking, in a raw-boned way. He pretended to be a rustic, but Amanda had talked to him often enough to know that he was widely read, and had constantly worked at educating himself during most of his fifty years. The tales about his prowess as a frontiersman—spread throughout the United States in campaign biographies—had been craftily designed, often by Crockett himself, to help him win his races for Congress.
    Now Crockett touched the muzzle of the pistol to his cap. “Miz de la Gura. You’re up early.”
    She stepped into the light, the once-elegant black silk dress rustling. “I seem to have gotten used to going to sleep to band music, Colonel.” She smiled.
    “Know what you mean.” Crockett smiled too, but uneasily.
    The lantern light revealed Amanda as a fairly tall woman, five feet seven, with a full, well-proportioned figure.