Eyes of Eagles

by William W. Johnstone

  Davy Crockett was a man of the forests and the open areas. He paced restlessly all about the walled-in compound. He did not like this type of fighting.

  Jamie squatted on his heels, rifle in hand, his face impassive, waiting.

  On his bed, his death bed, Jim Bowie wadded up and discarded page after page, not satisfied with his words. He alternately wrote his prose and cursed Fannin, Houston, Governor Smith, and everybody else he could think of who was in a position to send help, but who would not. The list was a lengthy one.

  Every man in the Alamo knew they were running short of powder. Every man there realized, without doubt, they alone could not hold against the sustained charges they knew were coming. They all had been told that Santa Anna was not a patient man. If he had to sacrifice every man in his army to crush this rebellion, he would not hesitate to do so.

  Reinforcements simply had to arrive. It was that basic. Without help, the men in the Alamo would die. All of them. And all of them knew this.

  Some men cursed. Others prayed. Crockett paced the plaza like an angry panther. Travis stared out at thousands of Mexican troops. Still others, like Jamie Ian MacCallister, were impassive and stoic. The men thought of hearth and home. Those that had not yet written their farewells borrowed pen or quill and ink and paper and did so. The defenders of the Alamo all waited and watched for help that did not arrive. And would not arrive in any force large enough to be effective against Santa Anna’s thousands.

  The politicians talked and talked and debated and procrastinated and patted themselves on the back for their brilliance... while the men of the Alamo, as soldiers have done for centuries, waited to die.

  * * *

  Crockett ceased his pacing and squatted down beside Jamie. ’Talk is, lad, that if help don’t come by tomorrow, it ain’t comin.’ ”

  Jamie nodded his head in agreement with that. Like every man there, he needed a shave and he needed a hot bath. The women there were doing their best to stay up with the laundry, but they were running out of soap. The defenders were living on meager portions of beef and beans and corn — and that was running out as well. Coffee was now being rationed.

  Crockett handed Jamie a slip of paper. “I ain’t much for hand-writin’, lad. But if you’d see this gets posted, I’d be obliged.”

  “I shall, sir. You know that Colonel Travis is sending me over the wall at the last moment?”

  “I do. And a mighty important job it is, too.”

  Another man walked up and handed Jamie a note. “I’d be obliged,” was all he said.

  Jamie nodded and put the short note into his pouch.

  “You have a good memory?” Davy asked.

  “Very good,” Jamie replied, and he was not boasting; just stating a fact. “Why?”

  “I spoke with Ol’ Jim last night,” Davy said, leaning close and lowering his voice. “He read me part of what he’s puttin’ to paper. It’s grand, lad, mighty grand. Flowery and all, but words that’ll run a chill up and down a man’s spine. I ’spect you best commit it to memory when you get it. Just in case you lose that pouch.”

  Jamie thought about that. It was a good idea. He nodded his agreement. “But I’ll ask him about it before I do.”

  Davy grinned. “I done done it. He said that he figured it was a good idea.” Crockett sobered and said, “Son, you got some mighty powerful enemies that’s put money on your head, you know that?”

  “Yes, sir. I know.”

  “When this fracas here is over... not that none of us will be alive to tell of it,” he added grimly and with more than a touch of fatalism, “you best hightail it out of Texas. I commenced to tell you whilst we was on the way here, so now I’ll finish it. What I know is this: the Saxon gang has swore to kill you, the Newby Brothers gang has swore to kill you, the Olmstead Brothers has taken a blood oath to do you in, and somebody name of Abel Jackson is worth considerable and has money on your head.”

  “I know,” Jamie said.

  “Powerful lot of folks got it in for you, boy.”

  “Not as many as this time last year,” Jamie replied with a smile.

  Crockett laughed and walked away. He knew all the stories about Jamie MacCallister, and knew them to be true. Jamie MacCallister was a man best left alone. Crockett also felt that Jamie was too good a man to be wasted in a foul-up like what was happening here. Jamie would never know it, but Crockett had also been instrumental in convincing Travis to send Jamie over the wall when all hope was gone. If he could make it, Crockett added silently

  All that day, Santa Anna had been beefing up his lines as additional troops arrived and were placed. If help should arrive, they best do it quick, the woodsman thought. For in a few more days, it would take a damn army to fight its way through.

  One man might make it, Crockett felt. He knew that Jamie had left his horses some miles out of town, and when he left it would be on foot.

  Crockett climbed back up on the rickety parapets, shored up on each end with dirt, and checked his rifle.

  “Lookee yonder, Davy,” one of his men said, pointing.

  A Mexican soldier was brazenly standing some five hundred yards from the mission, taunting the defenders.

  “You reckon Ol’ Betsy can bang that fer?” the man asked, a gleam in his eyes.

  Crockett spat on his fingers and rubbed a bit of spit on the sights. “That there Mex is gonna have a mighty sore butt,” he said, considerable heat in his tone, for the Mexican soldier was braving the cold and had dropped his trousers, showing his ass to the men of the Alamo. Bad mistake. The soldier was dancing around, wriggling his bare buttocks in a very obscene way. Davy Crockett said some very ugly words.

  Jamie had come on a run at the wave of a man and climbed up to stand beside Crockett. One glance told him that the frontiersman was very angry.

  Davy leveled the muzzle-loader and sighted in, taking up slack on the trigger. The pan flashed and the muzzle spat fire. The screaming of the soldier could easily be heard. He was rolling and thrashing about on the ground, one cheek of his buttocks bloodied. Two men ran to his aid. The Tennessee sharpshooters brought them down with two rounds. No one else tried to reach the dead or badly wounded men.

  The ass-shot soldier quickly crawled into a ditch and disappeared.

  “I’m a man who can take insults with the best of them,” Crockett said, reloading. “But I’ll be damned if that’s one of them.”

  As day four of the siege of the Alamo gave way to night, Santa Anna ordered his bands to play yet another concert. He ordered them to play gentle love songs. Santa Anna was a cruel man, and really, not a very intelligent person, but sometimes he felt he showed a streak of brilliance. The love songs, he reasoned, would make the men in the Alamo homesick and might cause some of them to desert.

  He was wrong again.

  Davy Crockett got his fiddle, and a Scotsman named MacGreagor, or MacGregor, got his bagpipes and together they managed to produce such an awful din that Santa Anna ordered his bands to play something, anything, just drown out the sounds of the fiddle and pipes.

  So day four ended, with no Texas volunteer hurt or killed, more than fifty dead or wounded Mexican soldiers, and one shot in the ass.

  Thirty-three

  The Fifty Day

  February 27th, 1836

  Crockett had reversed his earlier thoughts of the Alamo being an exercise in foolishness and now confided in a few of his friends that he understood why it had to be.

  “We got to hold up ol’ Santy Anner for as long as we can, boys,” he said to a small audience, of which Jamie and Bill Travis were a part. “We got to give them politicians time to palaver ’mongst theyselves and huff and puff and blow off steam.” Which meant, in Davy’s quaint way of speaking, give the Texans time to form a government and raise an army.

  “So we die givin’ them time to do all that?” one of his men finally brought the feelings of all out into the open.

  Travis held his breath.

  “Yep,” Davy Crockett sa
id. “That do just about sum it all up, boys.”

  “Wal, hell,” one of the Tennessee volunteers said. “If we’uns is to die for freedom, let’s do it up right. We got to have us a flag to wave.”

  “Yeah,” a New Orleans volunteer said. “And not that damn Mex flag, neither.”

  All were adamant on that.

  “You men think on it,” Travis said. “Then we’ll have the ladies here see what they can do.”

  “Mighty fine,” Crockett said. “Back to the walls, boys. We got us a war to fight.”

  So now they had resigned themselves to their fate, or at least many of them had. One man hung back and viewed his surroundings with a sour expression. His name was Louis Rose; his nickname was Moses.

  Travis continued to send out couriers, pleading for help and for supplies. He received neither. The bombardment from the Mexican cannon continued all day, and the old walls were beginning to suffer from the impacting balls. Travis pulled men from their posts to help shore up the crumbling walls with dirt and timbers. Santa Anna’s army crept closer in a prelude to a charge. But the Mexican infantry was cautious, careful not to get closer than a couple of hundred yards. To crawl any closer meant certain death. Even now, days before the final charge, the area all around the Alamo was stained with Mexican blood and bodies littered the cold ground.

  Santa Anna had ordered his men not to attempt to retrieve the bodies during the day, for Crockett and his riflemen just loved that. Not one successful daylight attempt had been accomplished. Even while the Mexican cannons roared, Crockett and his men exposed themselves to blast away at Santa Anna’s soldiers.

  Even though the defenders of the Alamo were low on supplies and pitifully, hopelessly outnumbered, on the fifth day of the assault, the men of the Alamo held on. They had no way of knowing, but the small band of volunteers from Gonzales (either twenty-five or thirty-two; it is unclear as to the exact number) were making ready to leave. They were bringing with them much needed powder and shot. But they would not arrive for two more desperate days.

  At the convention, meeting at Washington-on-the-Brazos, which officially was not due to convene until the first of March, the still-confused and disorganized government of Texas had not declared independence from nor war against Mexico.

  Had they known it, that would have come as a real surprise to the besieged men of the Alamo.

  * * *

  “Know this well, men,” Captain Albert Martin said to the band of volunteers preparing to ride from Gonzales to the Alamo. “We are marching to die. Any of you who are not prepared for that, step back now.”

  Not a man moved. In a few days, Colonel William Travis would draw a line in the dirt with his sword and throw down the same challenge to the men in the Alamo. Only one would refuse to take up the dare.

  “We march in thirty-six hours. We know that we must carry as many provisions as we can. So get ready. We’ll meet back here at dawn of the 29th.”

  Every man would return with as many provisions for the besieged mission as he and his horse could carry. Every man would return, knowing they were riding to their deaths. For freedom. For Texas.

  * * *

  Jamie and the other men of the Alamo worked frantically all the rest of that day, shoring up the crumbling old walls, which continued to take a terrible pounding from the cannon fire. Just as dusk began to lay her cloak of darkness over the land, a sentry yelled out, “Good God Amighty, boys! To your posts, to your posts. Here they come!”

  Travis leaped to the parapet and stared out in horror at what appeared to be thousands of Mexican troops, all rushing toward the walls of the Alamo.

  “Lower the cannons!” Dickerson yelled. “Quickly now, lads. They’re almost on us.”

  The muzzles of the cannon were quickly lowered for minimum elevation and loaded with grapeshot. Davy Crockett and his sharpshooter, dozens of loaded rifles at hand, were sighting in, Jamie stood beside Crockett, half a dozen loaded rifles nearby.

  At about two hundred yards, Dickerson let the four-and eight-pounders howl. When the smoke had cleared, the area was littered with the mangled bodies of dead and dying.

  “Fire!” Crockett hollered, and a dozen rifles roared as Dickerson’s crews worked quickly to reload.

  The cannon screamed and the sharpshooters along the walls would fire. After one more unsuccessful charge, the Mexican officers ordered the buglers to sound recall. They had had quite enough of the guns of the Alamo for this day.

  “My God!” Travis breathed, when all the smoke had drifted away and the grounds around the old mission were visible in the last rays of the setting sun. The sun glinted off of the bayonets of rifles lying beside the mangled bodies of at least several hundred Mexican soldiers.

  “Hold your fire!” Travis yelled, as one defender started to shoot a crawling wounded man. He turned to Jamie. “Jamie, ride out under a white flag and tell the Mexican officer who meets you that we will hold our fire while they collect their wounded.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Jamie rode straight up to the enemy lines, only a few hundred yards away from the walls. The lines were now heavily reinforced with earthworks, done at night to escape the bullets from the sharpshooters on the walls.

  “My respects to you, sir,” Jamie said to a man wearing a colonel’s epaulets. “My colonel, William Travis, says to tell you that we will hold our fire so you may collect your wounded and see to their needs.”

  “Young man,” the voice came from behind the officer.

  Jamie noticed the colonel sprang to attention.

  “Senor?” Jamie replied from the saddle.

  “It took a tremendous amount of courage for you to ride right up to our lines. I thank you for your commanding officer’s kind gesture.”

  He was still standing in the shadows and Jamie was not at all sure just whom he was speaking to.

  “Would you please dismount and have supper and conversation with me? I give you my personal word that you will not be harmed in any way.”

  Jamie swung down from the saddle and a Mexican soldier took the reins. “I’ll have some conversation and coffee with you, sir. And be honored. But I eat only what my comrades inside the walls eat.”

  The man chuckled. “I applaud your loyalty, young man. It is rare. Come. We’ll sit in comfort and talk.”

  Jamie walked toward the man and was startled to find himself looking General Santa Anna straight in the eyes.

  * * *

  “They will all die,” Tall Bull was told by the scout just returned from the south. He squatted down by the fire and warmed his hands, accepting the hunk of meat from the spit over the fire.

  Tall Bull waited, a warm buffalo robe wrapped around him.

  “The whites are barricaded in what appears to be an old place of worship. There are so many soldiers all around them it would be impossible to count them; it would be like trying to count the ants in a hill.”

  “Did you see Man Who Is Not Afraid?”

  “It would be impossible to get that close.”

  “You were gone so long we were worried that you might have been killed.”

  “I had to hide my horse and walk most of the way. The soldier patrols are everywhere.”

  “You truly feel that the defenders of this worship place are doomed?”

  “As surely as we are sitting close to this fire and the night is dark.”

  Tall Bull took a stick and drew in the dirt. “The defenders are here. Man Who Is Not Afraid left his home over here.” He jabbed at the earth. We know there is but one trail that the whites travel, a road. It leads to this place called Gonzales. We shall leave in the morning to find a halfway point between the fort and the town. I think a nice place along this river...”

  “The Guadalupe,” the scout said.

  “The what?”

  “Guadalupe River.”

  “Stupid name. No matter. If Man Who Is Not Afraid does manage to escape death at the fort, or church, or whatever it is, he must travel this trail. We sha
ll be waiting. I have spoken. Now I will rest.”

  * * *

  “Why?” Santa Anna asked Jamie, after an aide brought them both steaming cups of strong coffee.

  “Sir?”

  “Why do you choose to die in that old mission?”

  “I don’t choose to die, sir. But if I must die, I can think of no better reason than for freedom.”

  “Freedom?” Santa Anna was startled. “From what?”

  “From Mexico, General.”

  Santa Anna’s aides stiffened, knowing what a volatile temper he had. But the general only chuckled. “You must know that you will not succeed.”

  “We might not, sir. But this is only the beginning. Where we fall, where each man falls, ten or twenty or a hundred will take their place. Killing us will only throw grease onto an already raging fire.”

  Santa Anna smiled. “Then what would you have me do, young man?”

  Jamie paused, then chose his words carefully. “I think, sir, that the destinies of both you and your army, and those men in the mission... and to a larger degree, Texas, have been sealed. I think events are already locked in place and no matter what we say this night, they cannot be changed.”

  Santa Anna nodded his head slowly. “I think you are wise beyond your years, young man. What is your name?”

  “Jamie MacCallister, sir.”

  “Senor MacCallister, you know I cannot offer you or your companions mercy.”

  “We understand that, sir. I would ask, speaking for myself, that you do not harm the women and the children in the mission. Or the slaves.”

  “I was not aware of any women or children in the fort!”

  “Yes, sir. About twenty or so.”

  Santa Anna turned to an aide. “Note that. Advise the men that when the final assault comes, no harm is to come to women, children, or slaves.”

  “Si, General.”

  “Gracias, sir,” Jamie said.

  “Por nada.” Santa Anna stood up from the camp chair and Jamie rose with him. The general smiled and saluted Jamie. Jamie returned the salute.