by Zack Wyatt
“But I thought Burton was patrolling the coast from Corpus Christi to the border,” Sands said. “Leastways, that’s what Caldwell told me in Bastrop.”
Mavis chuckled as he pulled a twist of tobacco from a pocket and bit off a chaw. “Wish to hell that was all we had to patrol! We were given the whole damned gulf coast to ride—from the Louisiana border down to Mexico. Friend, that’s one sonofabitch to patrol in any man’s book!”
“The whole coast?” Sands couldn’t believe the assignment that had been placed on the shoulders of a mere twenty men.
Accepting the twist Mavis offered, Sands bit off his own chaw and handed it back to his fellow ranger. If one drew a straight line from the Texas-Louisiana border to the coastal tip of Texas, that line would measure more than three-hundred miles. And that line would all be in the Gulf of Mexico. The Texas coast wasn’t a straight line but a westward sweeping curve with a myriad of bays and coves that more than quadrupled the miles from Louisiana to Mexico.
“A bitch, ain’t it?” Mavis chuckled as he spat a brown stream of tobacco juice to his left. “Captain Ike has concentrated the patrolling between Corpus Christi and Galveston. He figures the Mexicans are too smart to try and land between Corpus and the border.”
The two hundred miles separating Corpus from the border were a rugged, desolate area with a decided lack of settlers. While the region offered the Mexican navy a perfect place to land a large invasion force unnoticed, such a force would be in the middle of nowhere.
The strength of a coastal invasion lay in surprise—which meant striking straight into one of the most heavily populated areas of the republic. With only twenty men at his command, Burton had made the correct choice in concentrating his efforts between the two port cities, Sands realized. Although even then the hundreds of miles separating Galveston and Corpus made the task almost impossible.
“So we’re headed for Copano Bay?” Sands pictured the wide bay that lay directly north of Corpus Christi Bay. Just getting around Corpus Christi Bay was a sixty-mile ride; then there were another twenty miles to Copano.
“It’s a long ride, but an easy one.” Mavis swept an arm out to Corpus Christi Bay on their right. The water turned to sparkling gold as the sun rose. “Might as well relax and enjoy the view. We’ll get there when we get there.”
Sands didn’t reply. If he had been given correct information in Bastrop, he could have settled Ann in Galveston, then ridden down the coast and delivered his report to Burton a week ago.
Spitting again, he silently cursed the ineffective line of communications that connected the various ranger posts throughout the republic. We’ll get there when we get there. Mavis’s remark echoed in his mind.
Sands squatted by the small campfire and sipped carefully from a tin cup of scalding-hot coffee. Sleepy yawns and muffled curses mingled with the sounds of men saddling horses about him. He glanced up, but saw nothing except half-formed shadows shifting in the dense fog that blanketed the coast.
“Best store away as much of that coffee as you can,” Jess Mavis said as he poured himself a cup from a pot hung over the fire. “We didn’t get much sleep last night, and Captain Ike won’t camp until sundown.”
Sands nodded and sipped again. He didn’t tell Mavis he wouldn’t be riding with the patrol. Once he delivered his report to Burton, he planned to grab a couple hours’ sleep, then head back to Corpus Christi for Ann, and from there back to his own company in San Antonio. He smiled, imagining the choice comments Captain Jack Hays would have about his long absence.
“Damned fog! It’s going to be slow traveling this morning until the sun burns this soup away.” A gravel-rough voice came from out of the fog—and with it a man. “Jess, down that coffee. We’ll be heading north again as soon as I hear what our visitor’s got to say.”
As Sands stood, the man shoved a meaty hand toward him and announced, “The name’s Isaac Burton. Understand you’ve brought a message from Matt Caldwell.” The viselike strength in that hand surprised Sands as he shook it. Isaac Burton, except for his ham like hands, was lean and stringy, standing just short of six feet. And he was old, by ranger standards, at least in his mid-forties. The face that grinned at Sands looked as if it had been chiseled from granite, then subjected to a year-long sandstorm that had barely smoothed out the rough edges of the stone.
“Yes, sir,” Sands said, reaching inside his shirt, pulling out the courier pouch, and handing it to the ranger captain. “There’s a letter inside from Captain Caldwell and a written report that he thought you should have.”
“Finish your coffee, son.” Burton motioned to the cup Sands had left beside the fire. He then untied the leather cord binding the pouch and opened the flap to withdraw letter and report.
As Sands retrieved his cup, he watched Burton quickly scan the letter, then turn to the report on the Mexican rifles and Professor Jonathan Peoples. “Interesting,” was his only comment as he hastily flipped through the report, then went back to the beginning to read it again slowly.
“Seems like we aren’t wasting our time riding back and forth between Corpus and Galveston, boys,” Burton called out to his troop when he finished his second reading. “Mr. Sands, here, had a run-in with a Mexican ship up around Louisiana a couple of weeks or so ago.”
Men, no more than dark shadows within the thick fog, pressed around the fire to listen while their captain gave them a thumbnail sketch of the report’s contents. When he concluded, he looked back at Sands and asked, “Anything you can add to this, son?”
Sands shook his head. “That’s everything that happened, captain. I left Bastrop and rode directly to Corpus Christi. Captain Caldwell thought you should see this as soon as possible.”
Burton nodded. “We’d gotten word about this patent-medicine man—Peoples. But it’s damned interesting to learn that the rifles he had with him came off a Mexican ship. The possibility of an invasion along the coast looks a mite stronger than it did ten minutes ago. Though I doubt this will make a difference with the politicians in Austin.”
Sands discerned a touch of bitterness in Burton’s voice. He couldn’t blame the man. Isaac Burton had been given an impossible task to perform, patrolling the whole Texas coast. If there were an invasion, he and his men would be expected to sacrifice their lives to buy the rest of Texas time to rally an army. Not that twenty men would buy much time.
“Reckon you’d best finish your coffee and mount up, son. The sun will be up soon, and we’ve got a long ride ahead of us today. The boys and me make forty miles a day ... every day,” Burton said while he neatly refolded Caldwell’s communiqués and slipped them back into the pouch.
“Excuse me, sir.” Sands felt an old sense of dread that came with the realization he had been volunteered for something. “I’m assigned to Captain John Coffee Hays in San Antonio; I was planning to—”
“I know what you had in mind. We’re shorthanded here, so I’m impressing you into this company,” Burton said, understanding and sympathy in his voice and smile. Then he tapped the courier pouch with a finger before stuffing it inside his shirt. “Besides, from what I gather in this, you’ve been gone from San Antonio for nigh on close to a month. That means Jack Hays has learned to get along without you. We might not be able to.”
Sands looked at the older man, shrugged, and nodded. “Good.” Burton smiled. “Ride alongside Jess today, and he’ll fill you in on our routines. Mostly we just ride the coast and watch the Gulf.”
As the man turned and walked back into the fog, Sands sipped at his now-tepid coffee and gazed down into the flames of the campfire. He smiled. There would be some benefits to his sojourn with Burton’s company. Here on the coast there were no Comanche to worry about. And there would be hot meals, a luxury Hays’s ranging company could ill afford. On the plains the light from even a small campfire could be seen for miles and drew raiding parties like moths to a candle.
“All right, mount up, boys,” Isaac Burton’s gravel voice rumbled out of the fog,
“We’ll take it slow and easy until this damned fog burns off.”
Sands downed two hasty gulps of coffee before dousing flickering flames with the dregs from cup and pot. Using the side of a boot to scoop sand atop the embers, he covered the fire, then returned to his buckskin to stuff cup and pot into his saddlebags before mounting.
“I should have listened to you and downed that whole pot,” he said as he reined in beside Jess Mavis. Just the thought of riding all day after being in the saddle half the night wearied him.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll wake you if you fall asleep in the saddle.” Jess chuckled. “Besides, just think about tonight when we camp. You’ll sleep like a baby—unless you draw guard duty.”
Sands answered his fellow ranger’s jovial laughter with a moan. A similar moan growled over his lips by the time the fog had at last burned away, and the sun rode high in the sky. Burton’s rangers didn’t stop for a midday break. Instead they ate from provisions tucked away in their saddlebags; the same fare Sands had within his: venison jerky, washed down with water from a canteen.
“How are you at surf fishing?” Jess asked as he finished gnawing the last bite of his jerky twist.
“Don’t know,” Sands replied while working at a mouthful of dry, peppery venison. “Never tried it.”
“Best learn. Captain Ike usually camps about an hour ’fore sundown. Cut you a pole, and I’ll lend you a hook and some line,” Jess said. “You get to eat what you catch. The only other choice is beans and bacon. When the bacon runs out—beans.”
“Guess I’m about to learn how to fish the surf,” Sands said with a roll of his eyes. “You don’t know how many meals of beans and bacon I’ve had these last weeks. Fish sounds like a banquet fit for the king of England!”
“You’ll get tired of it too, and just as fast,” Jess answered with a grin. “But at least it’s a change. And using a pole and line helps break the—”
“Captain!” a voice called out ahead of them. “Sails out beyond the bars!”
“Off the beach!” Burton’s gravel voice roared like the sound of grinding boulders. “Take cover back among the trees. I’ll have the hide of any man who ain’t hidden in two minutes!”
Sands glanced over a shoulder as he reined the buckskin toward the dense vegetation to the left. He saw nothing except water and waves. Nor did he pause to stare longer, but followed Burton’s company into the trees and dismounted with them.
When he looked back to the mouth of Copano Bay, he saw three masts and white sails poked up beyond a long sandbar. The hull of the ship remained hidden, though it was obvious that the vessel was headed northward, up the coast.
“Nothing to get excited about,” Jess said as Sands pulled his telescope from his sleeping roll. “Probably a merchant headed for Lavaca Bay.”
Sands could tell no more about the ship through his spyglass than he could eyeballing it. He did see San Jose Island on the horizon, beyond the mouth of Copano Bay and across Aransas Bay that separated the island from the mainland. The major portion of Texas’s coast was protected by a series of long, thin islands. To reach many of the republic’s ports, ships had to sail the narrow bays between mainland and islands.
“Mind if I take a look through that thing?” Jess asked, and lifted the brass telescope to his eye when Sands handed it to him.
“Might as well take a breather while she passes,” Burton called out to his men. “Camp, Webb: she’s yours.”
Sands glanced toward the ranger leader to see him collapse a brass spyglass similar to Sands’ own. “What did he mean by ‘she’s yours?’”
“Whenever we sight a ship, Captain Ike assigns two men to follow her along the coast, just in case.” Jess handed the telescope back. “Can’t waste the whole patrol on one ship.”
Sands nodded and gazed at the ship through the spyglass again. The prow of the ship was just visible with each rise of the—
“Damn!” He swung the spyglass upward and stared at the top of the masts. “Captain Burton! I think you’d better take another look at the ship. There’s no flags on her masts!”
Sands’ head jerked around to the ranger captain who had already extended his own telescope and peered toward the mouth of the bay.
“Sonofabitch! Son, I’ll be damned if you ain’t right!” Burton lowered the telescope and turned to Sands. His face was hard and somber when he spoke. “This just might be it. Time to break out our rifles!”
Chapter Eleven
With rifles primed and ready, seventeen Texas Rangers and their captain, Isaac W. Burton, crouched behind brush and tree and waited. Eighteen pairs of eyes were trained eastward, out across Copano Bay. Their focus was a single three-masted ship that flew no colors.
The craft slipped gracefully around the treacherous sandbars to each side of Copano’s mouth and sailed westward from Aransas Bay straight toward the ranger company’s position.
“She’s turning into the bay, boys!” Burton’s voice was a strained whisper as he peered at the ship through his telescope.
An amused smile lifted the corners of Sands’ lips. From where he leaned against the trunk of a towering palm to the mouth of Copano Bay was at least eight miles. A Comanche massacre could be underway here among this coastal forest and those aboard the ship would have been unaware of the war cries and the screams of the dying.
Neither the waves nor the bay’s width dominated Burton’s mind. It was the ship’s human cargo—an invasion contingency of the Mexican army—that strained the ranger captain’s voice to a whisper. In his mind, Isaac Burton was already battling the blue-uniformed Mexican marines as their landing craft rolled from the waves onto the beach.
Sands knew what occupied Burton’s thoughts as surely as he knew his mind was doing the same thing. Nor did he doubt that any man in the company thought of anything else at this moment. Sands had no idea how many soldiers were packed into the ship’s holds, but he was certain they outnumbered the eighteen men gathered to greet them here on the beach of Copano Bay.
Jess Mavis nudged Sands’ right side and held up Sands’ telescope from where he lay prone amid the high grass with long rifle trained at the ship. “Want this back?”
Jess whispered as softly as Burton, as did Sands when he answered, “Just for a moment, then you can pass it down the line so the others can take a look.”
The spyglass’ eyepiece at his right eye, Sands peered across the water. The ship was now well within Copano Bay, its sail billowing with the warm wind blowing in from the Gulf. Strain as he did, the young ranger was unable to discern the name painted on the bow or any details of the ship’s decks. The distance was too great for even the telescope to be of much use.
Sands lowered the spyglass and handed it back to Jess, who gazed through it once more before passing it to the ranger crouched beside him. After watching the telescope be passed into the hands of two other men, Sands’ eyes lifted back to the Mexican ship.
He sucked at his teeth. In truth, neither he nor any other man in the patrol knew for certain the three-masted vessel’s origin or that her holds were teeming with Mexican marines.
But as surely as he and Dub had sensed something was wrong when they first sighted the Vigilante, he knew the ship without colors furling from its masts had been sent northward from Mexico by Generalissimo Santa Anna.
Santa Anna’s San Jacinto defeat in ’36 at the hands of a ragtag Texian army led by Sam Houston had left a bitter taste with the Mexican leader. In spite of Sands’ understandable hatred for the man, he admitted Santa Anna was a military genius. The only black mark on the man’s career was the Texas War for Independence.
Memories flooded Sands’ mind—the thoughts and fears of a young boy barely old enough to shave away the trace of whiskers on his upper lip. A boy named Joshua Sands who tightly clutched a battered old musket in his hands that day Houston had led the attack on Santa Anna at San Jacinto.
In truth, Sands now realized, the Texian army would not have stood a chance against Sant
a Anna’s forces had not Houston charged while the Mexicans paused for their afternoon siesta. The generalissimo’s overconfidence—allowing his men their nap when they faced a battle—led to a complete rout of his army, and Santa Anna’s capture as he tried to escape disguised in the uniform of a private.
The Republic of Texas fought and won its freedom that day, and Santa Anna was eventually returned south of the Rio Grande to rejoin his army. However, the generalissimo had never lost his hunger for Texas, vowing that one day the Mexico flag would fly over the lands he had lost.
He might have made good that vow were it not for Mexico’s internal struggles, Sands thought. Santa Anna had lost favor with the Mexican people, and his government had crumbled after his defeat. But now, he had once again risen to power and turned his eye northward with the thought of erasing that black mark on his military career.
The very real threat of Mexican invasion provided the fuel for the present movement in Texas for the republic to apply for statehood with the United States. Statehood—and the United States Army—offered a means to retain Texas’s freedom. Something the young republic with its sparse population could not guarantee on its own.
“What the hell!” Burton’s growl scattered Sands’ thoughts. “She’s bringing her sails down! What’s going on?”
Sands glanced down the line of men to his right, located his telescope, and motioned for it to be passed back. From hand to hand it returned to him just in time for him to see the great anchor drop from the prow and splash into the water.
Sails unfurled and anchor lowered, the ship sat motionless in the middle of Copano Bay. The distance was still too great for Sands to make out any motion on the decks or read the vessel’s name. He waited for boats to be lowered over the side, but none came, nor did the situation change for the next two hours.
