“I think the general is probably ready for a fight now. Even if he isn’t, it’ll come anyway, because there’s aplenty of men in camp ready to do just what Ben Milam did. They’ll raise a holler, and off we’ll go.”

Dawn of April 21 found the skies clearing and the cold wind dying down after having blown hard in the last hours of darkness. Nine more volunteers arrived in a small cutter they had rowed up from the bay. James could see twenty or thirty campfires sending up their smoke along the four hundred yards or so of the Texan encampment. To the southeast, no more distant than perhaps a mile, James knew the Mexicans were camped in another patch of woods. He could not see them because of a gentle rise in the open prairie that separated the two armies. He had never regained track of the days after his long walk across Texas. He asked Andrew, who said it was Sunday.

James expected at any time to hear a command for the troops to fall in, to prepare for battle. The command did not come. He saw Sly Shipman and some of the other cavalrymen leading their horses out into the open to graze. Perhaps he had been wrong. Perhaps there was to be no fight.

The hours wore on, and a new report swept through the camp. Santa Anna’s forces had been reinforced early this morning. Texan scouts had counted some five hundred of them marching in from the direction of Vince’s Bridge across Buffalo Bayou. At the head of the column was the same General Cós who had defended, then abandoned San Antonio in December. This would bring Santa Anna’s strength to something like fifteen hundred men, the scouts reported. And the main force was still marching up from the south. When it arrived, the Texans would be hopelessly outnumbered. With their backs to the wide, deep bayou, they would be even more vulnerable than the men of the Alamo.

None of the officers had solicited James’s opinions, so he kept them to himself. He was aware that Houston and several of his field officers conducted a long council well into the afternoon. An officer he did not know came to his company and asked the men if they would rather attack the enemy across the open plain or wait in the woods and let the enemy come to them. There was no argument. If a dissenting voice was raised, James did not hear it.

“Let’s go and get them!” somebody shouted, and a chorus of voices was raised in support.

Looking at the sun, James guessed it was past three in the afternoon when an order was relayed along the length of the encampment. Form up!

James and Andrew and the other men afoot made a double line just beyond the edge of the wood. Cavalry units were interspersed, with one on each end of the long, long line that James guessed must stretch eight or nine hundred yards. Just in front of the line waited the Twin Sisters, the cannons which had seen their first fire in combat the day before.