“But, lady——” attempted the polite general.
Peggy would not listen.
“Take your men off me league immejiately, I say.”
“But, lady,” persisted the general, “to remove my army at this moment is impossible. We will try to do your property no damage.”
“Yez have already fought wan battle here and trampled down my grass and broke my trees,” stormed Peggy. “Take your men off me league.”
“Madam,” assured the general, with never a smile, “your wishes will be obeyed at the earliest possible moment. Colonel Forbes,” he directed, “will you see that this lady is furnished a proper escort to her habitation.”
Muttering indignantly, and still insisting that the Texas army be “taken off her league,” Peggy was conducted away by a file of soldiers.
“She came out with a broomstick, during the battle,” giggled Sion, “and she started in to whale both armies, for ‘fighting on me league’!”
The laughter at the courageous Peggy McCormick soon died. General Santa Anna had not been forgotten. Most of the army were hot with the determination that he should be executed. There were men who threatened that if General Houston did not order him shot, they themselves would shoot him at their first chance. He was kept under close guard, at his large tent near the general’s headquarters tree.
“The Texas government will make the biggest kind of a mistake if it decides to execute Santa Anna,” asserted Dick Carroll. “And General Houston knows it. Not but what Santa Anna ought to pay with his life, if that’s ever proper punishment; but as long as we hold him, the Mexican people will agree to ’most anything we ask. If we kill him, that’s the end. There’ll be another dictator, and more war, for Mexico’ll have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Besides, then they’ll go ahead with more massacres. Now we have our chance to keep the balance of power; and we can show to the world that we can take prisoners, and not murder ’em the way the Mexicans do.”