Frank asked, “What can we do?”

Shipman said, “Ain’t much you can do except surrender. About the worst he’ll do to you is to maybe haul you into Nacogdoches. Might even keep you in jail a few days before he takes you back to Louisiana. But he’s got a deep, dark dungeon cell waitin’ for me. I’d likely be an old man before I seen sunshine again.”

James was suddenly outraged. “You’re fixin’ to run off? You ain’t goin’ to stay and help us fight them?”

“Fight them hell! Didn’t you ever learn how to count?” Shipman turned to Frank. “You-all better educate this young fightin’ rooster before he gets everybody killed. Good luck, folks, and adiós.”

He spurred the dun horse eastward toward the Sabine. Several soldiers split off to follow him.

Annie cupped her hands in front of her mouth and shouted, “Run, Sly! Run!”

James had a feeling that the soldiers would catch nothing except the smell of Shipman’s dust.

A damned pity.

Turning to Frank, he found that his cousin appeared resigned to whatever fate Díaz planned for them. Frank’s rifle leaned against a wagon wheel. He looked at James’s, his eyes giving advice that he did not have to speak aloud. This time James counted the soldiers and knew resistance was useless. “Double damn the luck!” he swore, and leaned his rifle against the wheel with Frank’s. He stood beside his older cousin and waited for Díaz to rein up.

“I’m gettin’ almighty tired of this,” he said.

NACOGDOCHES WAS not a large town, nothing to compare with its French sister Natchitoches to the east. In the last of the two days it took the wagons to reach the old Spanish-Mexican outpost, James began seeing a fair number of small farms, most apparently operated by Mexican people. Disappointment and anger rode with him as steady companions. He silently cursed Díaz a while, then Sly Shipman. For the first time he began to develop a strong feeling of being helpless in a foreign land. The feeling was reinforced by the soldiers who rode on either side, and by Sergeant Díaz, who had lectured the Lewises severely on the penalties for breaking Mexican law. Díaz had also talked about their poor judgment in aiding and abetting a fugitive from justice. James had restrained himself from commenting on the soldiers’ use of slow horses.

Díaz said, “A few days in our jail will teach you respect.” But whatever the sergeant’s resentment about their slipping back into Texas, James noticed that he remained solicitous about Hope’s health, and he camped early the first evening when he saw she was becoming tired. The second afternoon brought them through the tall pines and into the outskirts of town while the sun was still more than an hour high in the west.

Frank said with concern, “Me and James can stand some time in the jailhouse if we have to, but you wouldn’t put the womenfolk and the boys in there, would you?”