Off tumbled Ernest, and he and Jim shook hands and grinned at one another.
“Where’ve you been, anyhow?” demanded Jim—who carried his little rifle, and looked just about as when Ernest had last seen him, after the capture of San Antonio.
“At the convention at Washington.”
“All this time? Pshaw! I’ve been here nigh a week. Aren’t you going to enlist?”
“I sure am,” asserted Ernest.
“Whom did you come over with? Houston? We need him, or somebody as good.”
“Why, Jim? How’s the Alamo? Anybody heard? Is Travis still there? Where are the Mexicans?”
Jim sobered.
“I don’t know. Nobody knows. We haven’t heard a shot since early Sunday morning. I got in here with the Bastrop company (went up there from home and enlisted) on the fifth. The morning of the fifth, at sunrise, on the march over, we heard Travis’s signal guns; and all that day there was a little cannon shooting yonder in the west. The people here at Gonzales said they’d been hearing the cannonading for more than a week, especially when the wind was right. But before sun-up of Sunday morning, the sixth, there was a tremendous lot of firing—you could almost hear the Mexican muskets in big volleys; sounded like an awful battle, and lasted till long after breakfast. Then, about an hour by the sun, it died down, and suddenly it quit, and we haven’t heard a single shot since.”