“Maybe so,” agreed Jim. “But I’d like to be here, too, and help take Bejar while they’re talking.”
However, the taking of Bejar did not progress very rapidly. To be sure, on the next day, which was November 29, the expected reinforcements arrived—200 from East Texas, so that now the army numbered 600, rank and file. General Austin stayed at Concepcion, with one-half the army, and sent the other division, under Colonel Edward Burleson, the Jackson soldier, up the river about half a mile, so that now two sides of Bejar were guarded; the cavalry rode around and around, covering all sides; and not a Mexican soldier ventured out of the fortifications, except to cross the river between Bejar and the Alamo.
Sion had gone with the Burleson division; and with Leo still absent in the east, this left Jim and Ernest to depend on one another again.
It was said that General Austin was delaying for more cannon, and a body of volunteers from the United States. An express from San Felipe brought word that the consultation had gathered, and that two companies of the United States volunteers were sailing from New Orleans to join the Texans. He brought also copies of a proclamation that had been issued by the Central Committee of Defense (now changed to a General Council) at San Felipe, to the citizens of the United States.
Dick Carroll got hold of one copy, and read it aloud to a little group which included Jim and Ernest.
San Felipe de Austin,
October 26, 1835.
To the Citizens of the United States of the North:
The general council of all Texas have determined to address you in behalf of suffering Texas, and to invoke your assistance.
Our citizens were invited to settle Texas by a government having for its model that of the United States of the North. Under that invitation thousands emigrated here, and have subdued a vast and extended wilderness to the purposes of agriculture. In place of the solitary region inhabited hitherto only by the savage and the beast, they now present a country prosperous in the highest degree, and having inscribed on its face a universal assurance of its future greatness and prosperity.