It was a slow, murderous campaign fought by fits and starts, often hand to hand, knife to knife, Texan rifles and Mexican escopetas firing at point-blank range. When artillery and musketry made the streets too dangerous for the men to cross, they used logs for battering rams and drove holes through the stone and adobe walls, fighting from room to room, house to house, inexorably closing in on the Mexicans’ main entrenchments. The Texas fighters might have been farmers, but they were also hunters, and their marksmanship was as deadly here as it had been at Velasco. Wherever an enemy soldier showed his head, he was likely to lose it.

The battle continued for four days and was finished without the fiery leadership of the man who had precipitated it. On the afternoon of the third day, old Ben Milam was leading a charge across a street and fell with a bullet in his brain. The battle went on, even as Milam was being buried in the courtyard of the house of the Veramendis, family of Jim Bowie’s late wife.

James had known nothing of Ben Milam before Milam had issued his challenge to the men, but he felt the loss as if the old fire-eater had been a lifelong friend. And it brought home to him once again the high cost of war. But the die had been cast. There was no backing away, no retreat now, or all those who died would have died for nothing.

So the fight went on, the Texan vise gradually tightening yard by yard, plaza by plaza, house by house, until on the fifth day a white flag went up in the Alamo. General Cós was surrendering to a force a third the size of his own.

James was caught up for a time in the euphoria of victory. A captured Mexican blanket wrapped around his shoulders, he and Isaac Blackwood and others danced in a dirt street to the music of a soldier’s flute. But the glow began to fade when they came upon Elizandro Zaragosa and found the former soldier ashen-faced, his arm bound with white cloth through which a red stain had seeped. Zaragosa sat on the ground, his back propped against the tall wheel of an ox cart. His Mexican compatriots who had fought against the forces of Santa Anna were gathered around him, not mixing with the victorious Anglo Texans. James wondered if this was by their own choice or if they had found that the Texans were not quite ready to accept them, even though they had fought side by side. He suspected it was some of both. Though the men of two races who had taken Bexar shared a wish to be free of tyranny, they were of different cultures. They looked differently and spoke different languages. No matter how much they might share, there was a line over which neither would cross.

James knelt at Zaragosa’s side. “I didn’t know you’d been shot. At least it was just your arm.”