“Bang!”
“It won’t do for you to try that game, now, general,” warned the shooter. The ranks laughed. General Houston glared around him for an instant, and with a shrug of his great shoulders clapped his sword back and rode to the front again.
The column lunged forward at best speed. Now indeed it was a race to see which army would be the first to reach the crossing. Colonel John A. Wharton, of the staff, took thirty of the cavalry and dashed away, to reconnoitre the crossing and keep the enemy in play until the army could arrive. Jim and Ernest regretfully watched the advance disappear in the margin of the timber. Only men had been picked, mainly from one company.
“I always knew I ought to have joined that company, in the first place,” deplored Jim. “Now they’ll find Santa Anna and get all the best clothes!”
But no sounds of a battle were heard—ah, yes, there echoed a rifle shot! And another. The shooting ceased. And when, breathless, dripping, men and horses alike, with perspiration, the army rounded a shoulder of timber, they saw, before, an expanse of flat, marshy ground, inhabited by myriads of piping, screaming wild fowl; eastward still was flashing San Jacinto Bay, with the juncture of the Buffalo Bayou and the San Jacinto River above its upper end—the few scattered houses at Lynch’s Ferry, and the waiting horsemen of Colonel Wharton’s command. Not a Mexican soldier was in sight.
The Colonel Wharton detachment were found at the ferry landing in possession of a fine new flatboat equipped with a sail and loaded with foodstuffs. They said that Captain Hancock and Lieutenant Crain and four others had arrived before the rest, and that a guard of twenty Mexican soldiers had fled south without firing a shot. Had left the flatboat, of course—for which, much obliged to them! Santa Anna had shipped the boat up the bay from New Washington, to be ready for him. Now he could come and get it.
“We won. Hurrah!” cheered Ernest, excitedly. “We beat Santa Anna to the crossing.”
“Yes, sir; and we corralled a flatboat full of breakfast, too,” reminded Jim. “Do you see that big house yonder, across the San Jacinto? That’s Lorenzo de Zavala’s house. He lives here. He and Colonel Lynch and the rest of the bay fellows are right at home.”
General Houston immediately ordered the boat taken up the bayou about three-quarters of a mile, and the army to follow along the bank, out of the flat to the timber.
Camp was made on high ground in the shade of great live-oaks, whose branches were festooned with the drooping Spanish moss. It was a beautiful spot. The bayou, wide, and sluggishly flowing in a curve between green banks, was behind. On the left the San Jacinto River rippled past the bayou’s mouth, and widened into San Jacinto Bay, bordered by salty marshes. On the right, distant about six miles, Vince’s Bayou extended down to Vince’s Bridge in the southwest, at the Harrisburg road. Before, a rolling prairie stretched two miles to the swamps of the inward curving bay. A timbered rise jutted out before the camp; and several hundred yards out on the prairie, were two timber “islands,” or motts; one in front of the camp, the other to the left.