“These pigs are. My brother James paid a high price for them.”

Isaac nodded thoughtfully. “I never looked at it that way.” He held a brooding silence until they reached the dog-run. “I’m afraid it’s a lot bigger problem than just pigs. I hear there’s been a right smart of trouble with the soldiers, one place and another. If the government don’t do somethin’ before long there’s apt to be a killin’ somewhere. One killin’ leads to more killin’s. Ain’t no tellin’ where it’ll stop.”

Annie had heard enough to sense that he could be right. “You think this could eventually lead us into a war?”

Isaac shrugged his broad shoulders. “I just know that you ain’t come to no happy country.”

PART II

THE

SEEDS

OF

REVOLUTION

Texas, 1832

XIII

JAMES LEWIS decided at their first meeting that William Barret Travis was a potential troublemaker, a firebrand who spoke his mind regardless of consequences. He liked him on sight.

Travis stood six feet tall, weighed 175 pounds, and had a touch of red in his hair as well as in his temperament. About the same age as James, he was a lawyer rather than a farmer. He had left Alabama after a brief and unhappy marriage and sought new surroundings in which to make a fresh life. He came to Texas with a wagon train from New Orleans headed for Nacogdoches. James and Sly Shipman, with a pack train of mules, happened across the westbound wagons east of the Sabine River in Louisiana. A couple of the wagons were bogged to the hubs in mud. James and Shipman unpacked the mules and lent them to the task of dragging the wagons up onto firm ground. Invited to camp the night and share supper, they willingly accepted the offer to eat a meal prepared by someone else. Neither had more than passable skill as a cook.

Sitting at the campfire, watching the reflected red light of the flames play across Travis’s animated face, James found himself spellbound. Being a lawyer, the man had a gift with the language. Though he had not yet seen Texas, he had already learned much about it through diligent reading and inquiry. He talked of the land and its promise. He voiced a strong opinion that Texas should break its bonds with feudalistic Mexico and attach itself to the United States.

James declared, “I do believe you’re right, sir.” Not to many did James say sir, but Travis had the look and manner of an educated man, yet one who adapted with ease to the role of frontiersman. “I’ve thought along the same lines ever since I had a run-in with them convict soldiers. We wouldn’t've put up with such as that back in Tennessee. We wouldn’t've had to.”

But Sly Shipman took a different view. To Travis he said, “I don’t reckon there’s any law can stop a man from thinkin’ what he wants to, so long as he keeps his thoughts in his head and don’t let them all spill careless out of his mouth. But you go talkin’ that way down in Texas and you’re liable to find yourself settin’ in a dungeon cell where you can talk all you want to and there won’t nobody hear you.”