“My folks have gone—took only the little they could carry,” said Jim, soberly.
“So have mine,” said Sion.
Ernest, hearing, was glad, for once, that his mother was in Cincinnati.
Leo had enrolled in the company from Velasco, near where he lived. He’d traded his shot-gun for a musket, but otherwise he was the same manly Leo of the campaign against Bejar.
On the next day, which was Palm Sunday, March 27, the timber along the Brazos River was reached. And when the march crossed the San Felipe road, from the Colorado to the Brazos, rain had begun to fall, so that all the bottom-lands were heavy with black mud.
Scores of settler families were pressing through the mud, for safety in the east. Carts filled with the feeble and the children and household goods were stuck fast in boggy places, and people, young and old, mainly women and children, were trudging ankle deep—many with no shoes, all wet and miserable.
“That’s sure a runaway scrape,” remarked Jim. And as the Runaway Scrape is the frenzied flight still known. “An awful pity, too. Expect my mother is out in the rain and mud, just like the rest. And Sion’s and Leo’s.”
Morning dawned damply upon a muddy camp. When orders to march were given, Captain Moseley Baker’s company refused to retreat any further; and the wagon oxen of the Captain Wiley Martin company could not be found. These two companies stayed behind; but the general, to avoid any quarrel, ordered Captain Baker to remain at San Felipe and guard the river crossing against the Mexicans, and for Captain Martin to guard the Fort Bend crossing below. So for a little time Jim and Leo and Ernest did without the pugnacious Sion.
In torrents of rain, Monday, the retreat continued, plastered with mud and drenched with water. Creeks were forded. The wheels of the baggage wagons that had been collected bogged to their axles, and several times General Houston clambered off his horse and impatiently put his shoulders to the tires, helping the men and oxen. His thin black coat was soaked through and through.