That stamp went beyond the look. After a youth spent meeting the challenge of the fields and forests in Tennessee, James felt he was unlikely to encounter anything in Texas that he could not handle, given a little helpful counsel by Michael and Andrew to set his feet firmly upon the ground. His older brothers had one advantage: nearly a decade of experience in Texas. But James thought his youth should make up the difference. By his reckoning, Michael must be thirty now and Andrew about twenty-eight. In Tennessee that was regarded as almost middle aged. He supposed people must wear out at about the same rate in Texas.

He rode fifty yards in front of the lead wagon, watching for anything that might cause difficulty, such as a tree fallen across the trail or a washout that might break a wheel. Indians were in the back of his mind, but he had been told in Natchitoches that they were not likely to create trouble on this leg of the journey. The ones in eastern Texas were generally friendly. Folks had said it was renegade white men he should watch out for. Some, whose presence was greatly desired by the authorities in Louisiana and farther east, had found refuge in the redlands of eastern Texas, where the Mexican army force was small and mostly ineffective. Well, sir, they would be sorry if they came looking to prey upon these wagons. James held his long rifle across his saddle, ready for whatever might come. Folks back home claimed he was as good a shot as his brother Michael had been. He had kept the family table well supplied with meat after Michael left to go west. Though James had never been called upon to squeeze the trigger against a man, he did not doubt that he could do it. He wouldn’t need the Mexican army to defend him and his.

The Mexican army. That was the only thing which gave him pause about coming to Texas: it belonged to Mexico. That made it a foreign land, with laws different in some ways from those he had known. He had often wondered how Michael and Andrew had made the adjustment. In Michael’s letters, which James suspected had been written for him by his Louisiana French and Spanish wife, Michael had assured him that this was no particular obstacle. American settlers far outnumbered those from the Mexican interior, and most local laws in the American colonies were patterned after ones familiar in the old states. In many ways it would be as if James had never left home, except that most of his family had remained far behind him.

But not all. He looked back at the lead wagon where his sister Annie drove the team of four big, strong mules that their Uncle Benjamin had selected from the best he owned. James never had understood why Annie wanted to come along, except perhaps that she thought she might find a better husband in Texas than the many prospects she had passed over in Tennessee. She was twenty-two, well on the way to becoming an old maid by Tennessee standards. Most men considered her uncommonly handsome, and many a likely lad had come calling. The best James could figure, she had measured them all by the memory of her brother Michael. As a girl she had idolized Michael, just as James had done. None of the young suitors cast a shadow as long as Michael’s.