Though the Mexican camp was out of sight beyond the rising ground, James felt sure that sentries or scouts must be watching. Yet tall Sam Houston, parading back and forth in front of the line on a big white stallion, was preparing to lead these men in a frontal assault against Santa Anna’s superior force. James could hear him shouting orders and encouragement, but he could not make out many of the words. Someone repeated a few of them, and the words echoed down the line: “Remember the Alamo! Remember Goliad!”

A short distance down the line James could see the dark-skinned men in Juan Seguín’s company of Mexican volunteers. Seguín had missed being in the fall of the Alamo because Travis had sent him out as a courier in search of reinforcements. James could see the slight form of young Manuel Zaragosa and wondered what thoughts must be running through his mind now as he prepared to take vengeance for the slaughter of his father and so many others.

The breeze brought him fragments of distant music, fifes and a drum. And it brought him Houston’s thundered order: “Trail arms! Forward!”

The line began its awkward movement away from the woods and out upon the open plain, most of eight hundred men marching to free Texas or die.

JAMES’S MOUTH was dry, but his hands were wet and slick against the rifle. At any moment he expected the Mexican guns to open up. He expected Santa Anna’s big twelve-pounder to begin blowing holes in this ragged Texan line, followed by a rush of Mexican cavalry. It would be easy, he thought, to outflank this unwieldy formation and cut it down as a farmer might cut a row of wheat with a scythe. But, incredibly, it did not happen. He watched, hardly believing, as the artillerymen towed the Twin Sisters in front of the infantry line. He wondered how many times artillery had ever charged into battle like foot soldiers.

They had topped the rise and were almost upon the Mexican camp before the first alarm went up. James realized with amazement that they had caught Santa Anna and his men at Sunday siesta. So contemptuous had el presidente been of the Texans that he had neglected even to post a normal guard. It had been unthinkable that Houston would be foolhardy enough to attack such a superior force across a mile of open ground. Yet this was exactly what the Texans had done.

James would later learn that Santa Anna was in his tent, amusing himself with a pretty young mulatto slave girl he had captured at a nearby plantation. Not even the first sounds of scattered musket fire from his own troops brought him out to investigate. By the time he became alarmed, it was too late.

At a range of some two hundred yards, the Twin Sisters opened up on the Mexican camp. The infantry and the cavalry moved out of a walk and into a run. Mexican escopetas were answered by Texan rifles and shotguns. The cavalry ripped into the Mexican flank with a fiery vengeance as foot soldiers burst into and over Santa Anna’s outer guard.