"Ugh! Heap young brave. Bring Texan to Big Knife. Heap fight Mexican."
He may have been perfectly aware that Colonel Travis was the white chief who was in actual command of the rangers and the fort. To his mind, however, the Texan armies, if not the republic itself, were best represented by the stalwart hand-to-hand fighter who had given him the knife which he now so carefully concealed under his buckskins. Having done so, he transferred his old, half-despised butcher-knife from his leggings to his belt, and remarked concerning it, "Mexican take? Ugh! No lose heap knife. Take Mexican hair."
There was a menacing look in his face, and he rode on with the air of an adventurer who was quite ready for mischief, if a chance for any should be given him.
The region of country he was to go through was supposed to be peaceable, as yet. It contained only scattered ranches and small settlements, but it might speedily contain almost anything else, for perils of all sorts were pouring in upon the Texas border.
Matters at the fort were quiet, but the rangers in their quarters, even while running bullets, and the officers in their hammocks, not one of them asleep, seemed to have constituted themselves a kind of general council of war. At least they were discussing every feature of the situation, and were talking themselves more and more into a state of mind that bordered closely upon contempt for Santa Anna and his five thousand men.
The most undemonstrative man among them all was Colonel Bowie. He had slung his hammock near one of the embrasures, with a cannon at his side, and, like the cannon, he was continually peering out. Even after it grew darker and only moonlight remained to show him anything, he every now and then seemed to take an inquiring look at the surrounding country.
"I can see that cave," he muttered to himself, "as clear as if I were in it. What if the fate of a young nation should depend upon our getting into that hole again? If those old rascals knew we were coming, they'd pitch it all down the chasm. I'd like to know, just for curiosity, what fellows and how many of them have been butchered before that altar. In the old times they used up whole tribes and regiments of captives that way. Then I'd like to know where all that bullion came from. I don't believe they mined for it. They didn't know how. They got it out of river-beds, I reckon, just as they do in Asia and Africa."
He had hit the mark, for there was no other way imaginable. But where were the riverbeds, and how much more gold-dust and nuggets might there be remaining in them?
He could dream and speculate there in his hammock, but that was all he could do. His young republic was indeed to come and go. Mexico was to lose Texas and her other northern provinces. The pioneers among whom he was so daring a leader were to accomplish even more than they were planning. Beyond all his dreams, however, would be the solution of his gold problem. Only a few years later the slopes and gulches of the California mountains were to swarm with hardy miners, and the treasures of the Montezumas were to sink into insignificance in comparison with the wealth to be taken out, not by the Aztecs or the Spaniards, but by the "Gringos."
Would anybody then be found to take note of the fact that Bowie and his comrades were the advance-guard, the skirmish-line, almost the "forlorn hope" of the armies of Taylor and Scott? The United States, the world at large, and even Mexico, owe their memories something of recognition, and they were not even much "ahead of their time."