James and Shipman had no inkling that rebellion was bubbling toward a boil when they led their mule train down the coast, though they knew about Bradburn and were taking particular care to avoid his soldiers. They had been traveling mostly by night, laying up in the daylight, until they neared their destination at Liberty. There they expected a lucrative trade. Sunrise had caught them still on the trail, looking for a suitable hiding place to spend the daylight hours. Suddenly they saw a considerable body of horsemen coming toward them. It was too late to hide.

“Whip them up!” Shipman commanded, pointing toward a heavy forest a mile or so to the east. Once in the forest, they should have some chance to elude the horsemen, who looked at the distance like cavalrymen. James shouted and set the mules into a hard run. But he saw the riders pull out of the trail and quarter across to intercept them. He popped the trailing mules with a whip and shouted encouragement, but he felt dismay as he realized the horsemen were going to overtake them before they could reach the wood. Shipman, riding in the lead, could see it, too. He gave James a sign to slow down.

“We can fight them,” James shouted, but he realized Shipman could not hear him. It would have made no difference if he had. Shipman was too cautious a man to fight odds that appeared to be seven or eight to one. Reluctantly James slowed, and so did the mules, once he stopped pressing them. He remembered the smell of that cell in Nacogdoches and wondered what kind of jail they had in Anahuac.

His despair and anger gave way to relief as he realized the approaching riders were not soldiers. They were civilians, settlers by the look of them. They were all armed. For a fleeting moment he considered the possibility that they might be robbers, but that was unlikely. There had been little of that kind of deviltry down in the interior of Texas, though it still went on in the no-man’s-land strip between Natchitoches and the Sabine River and occasionally spilled over onto a little of Texas along that border.

Shipman raised one hand as the first of the riders reached him, showing that he intended no fight. James circled the mules to be certain they would not keep running and perhaps be lost. That done, he reined Walker to Shipman’s side. Shipman had quickly established that the riders meant no harm.

The leader was a broad-shouldered man, fierce of eye and straight in the saddle. He had all the bearing of a man in charge. “We did not mean to give fright,” he said, not so much in the manner of apology as simply in explanation. “We thought you might be a couple of Bradburn’s soldiers bringing supplies.”

Shipman had regained whatever composure he might have lost. “No sir, we are but honest tradesmen, goin’ about our business.”

“Honest?” one of the other riders asked. “Smugglers, you mean.”