“Good for the Redlanders!” cried Ernest. This news from Sam Houston certainly sounded like business. “What’ll we do? March to Bejar and clean the Mexicans out of Texas?”
“Go slow,” cautioned Dick. “You’re just like all these other fellows; spoiling for a fracas. Want to eat the Mexicans at a bite and go back home to their folks and crops. We’ve less’n three hundred men, and Bejar isn’t the only post we’ve got to tackle. There’s Victoria, and Goliad, south, on our flank――and I understand a hundred men are to be sent off against those places. As I calkilate, we gain by waiting a bit, and like as not some of those Mexicans who can’t stomach any dictator business will help us. De Zavala’s come in to San Felipe already, and offered himself to Austin.”
“That’s right. He’s thrown in with Texas, for liberty and the constitution of ’24; and he was governor of the State of Mexico, too――until Santa Anna chased him out and put a price on his head. That means we’ll probably get a lot of Mexican patriots, as soon as they understand we’re fighting for state freedom. But this camp’s so cocky, doesn’t seem like it’ll wait for Austin or Houston or reinforcements or anything.”
“What man do you want for commander-in-chief, Dick?” queried Ernest.
“Houston,” promptly answered Dick. “Sam Houston. Didn’t I go clear up north to find him, for Texas? But I don’t reckon he’ll be elected. They’re most all West Texas men hyar, yet, and he’s of East Texas. How about it, Henry?” and he hailed Henry Karnes, the red-headed Arkansas trapper and Apache “big medicine,” who on moccasined feet was striding by. “Do you figger we can elect Sam Houston?”
“Wall,” he drawled, “if he was on the spot he might be elected. Or if we-all were thar he might be elected. But he’s away out yonder, recruitin’ the Redlanders. I think a heap of Houston, myself, but I reckon Austin stands a better show. Everybody knows Austin. He’s got some folks, though, that hold he’s too sort of mild, for a fightin’ man. Fact is, I don’t see how anybody can be elected; this hyar camp’s so split up, with every company shoutin’ for its own separate candidate.”
And that was true. The election had been ordered for to-morrow, and the camp and the town were in a perfect buzz of electioneering. Texas was so large, and the settlements were so widely divided off, that each locality formed a clan, eager to have a man from among themselves as the leader.