It began to rain. Annie loosened her hold on Shipman and looked up, the drops pelting her face. “Just what we needed, with these wagons to move. More water and more mud.”

Shipman said, “It’ll slow Santa Anna as much as it slows us.” Still holding Annie by the hand, he turned toward Nelly Blackwood and her children. “Let’s get these folks on the wagons and get movin’. It’s a long ways to the Sabine.”

They pulled out, leaving the Blackwood wagon standing in a driving rain.

XXVI

JAMES LEWIS had tried to count the days but had lost track, walking in a northeasterly direction through a part of Texas he had never seen before. He tried at first to move only at night, but he found it painfully difficult making his way afoot through the rough chaparral in darkness. Twice he wandered into thick stands of prickly pear cactus and found himself entrapped. No matter which way he turned, he drove the thorns into his legs until he had to give up, sit on the ground and wait for dawn to let him pick his way through. With his fingers and his knife he pulled out those thorns he could get hold of. The rest would remain until they festered and came out of their own accord.

He knew he ran considerable risk moving in daylight, so he stayed constantly alert for sign of riders. Several times he thought he saw them, and he dropped flat upon the ground, heedless of the stickers and thorns. Once they turned out to be deer, warily picking their way along, browsing on the low-growing brush, then bounding away when they saw him. Once they turned out to be wild horses, drifting toward water. More often what he thought was riders turned out to be his imagination. The wild horses at least led him to water.

Having the rifle allowed him to kill game. Otherwise he might have starved or been reduced to trying to subsist on roasted prickly-pear pads, which he had heard was possible. The first time, hungry almost to the point of delirium, he managed to shoot a deer. Fearing that his shot might be heard by Mexicans, or perhaps roving hostile Indians, he laid low for an hour, hardly daring to rise his head above the level of the low chaparral until he was satisfied that nobody was coming in response to the shot. He built a small fire but gave the first piece of venison time for no more than a little scorching on the surface. He devoured it with the ferocity of a half-starved wolf.

He carried along all the meat he could, eating from it for days, until it began to spoil.

Some of the pear thorns became infected, and he began running a fever. He had heard of people using a prickly pear poultice to draw away infection. He singed the thorns from several pear pads, split them open lengthwise, and applied them to the festering places. He had to lie up a couple of days until the fever broke and healing began.