James was not offended. Staying with the women and children would not have been his choice, anyway. “So you want me to help you look for Michael.”

“There’s no use in the both of us goin’ together. We’ve got little enough chance of findin’ him even by splittin’ up. Texas is a hell of a big country when you set out a-lookin’ all over it for somebody lost.”

James knew. He had traversed a goodly part of it, first in getting here, then in the period he had spent working the clandestine import-export trade with Sly Shipman, and finally in going to the battles at Velasco and Bexar. “I’ll go south,” he volunteered. “As I recollect, when Michael rode away from here he was goin’ to try to help take Goliad away from the Mexicans. Last I heard. Fannin’s troops were there. Maybe Michael’s with them.”

Andrew nodded. “That suits me. I’ll go to San Felipe and see what I can find out. Maybe somebody at the council has got a list of the volunteers. Then I’ll find where Sam Houston’s army is at. Michael might’ve decided to join up with it. I don’t think he’d've let himself get caught up in a fool’s errand like that bunch marchin’ off to attack Matamoros.”

The look in Marie’s eyes had shaken James. He asked, “Do you think we’ve really got any chance of findin’ him?”

“About as much chance as a lamb in a wolf’s den. But he’s our brother. We’ve got to try.”

XXII

JAMES HAD never been as far as Goliad before. Known by two names, the older being La Bahía, it had long been second to San Antonio de Bexar as one of the three principal Mexican settlements in Texas. The third, far to the north, had been Nacogdoches. Approaching the little settlement, James could see that it had already experienced the war in a painful way. The place was nearly deserted of civilians. Most of its stone houses and its stick-and-mud jacales stood empty. Their inhabitants had fled in anticipation of a coming battle between the Texan forces which held the presidio and the Mexican troops even now reported marching up from the south. Most of those inhabitants had been Mexican. They had feared mistreatment at Texan hands as much as the likelihood of their being caught in the crossfire if and when the soldiers from Mexico set out to take back this presidio they had lost in October to the Bay Prairie company of volunteers under Ben Milam and George Collinsworth.

Now Ben Milam was dead, killed in the December battle for San Antonio de Bexar, and Collinsworth had moved on to other duties. The presidio was under the command of James W. Fannin, temporarily serving as head of the provisional Texas government’s armed forces while Sam

Houston was away among the Indians, negotiating for them to keep the peace and allow the Texans to fight just one enemy at a time. Fannin had marched to Goliad as the first leg of his expedition to Matamoros but had halted here after learning that the Mexicans had greatly strengthened their troop strength at that ancient Mexican town just below the Rio Grande. Goliad was of strategic value to Texas because it lay only some forty miles from the new port of Copano, on the Gulf, and commanded the road between the Gulf and San Antonio.