The squall of the baby in the fallen papoose wrenched McAllen to his senses. He drew a long breath, straightened, and put the Colt under his belt. The papoose lay beneath the arm of the dead woman. McAllen gently moved the arm and picked up the papoose. The Ranger lay perfectly still, watching his every move.
"If I ever see you again," said McAllen, "I'll kill you."
He walked out of the tepee, and saw Yancey locked in a lethal wrestling match with a Comanche. Before he could go to his friend's aid, another Indian, this one mounted, came out of nowhere, bearing down on him with a war club raised and a piercing cry on his lips. McAllen recognized him as one of the young Quohadi chiefs at the Council House. This one, then, had been among the few who had managed to get out of San Antonio alive.
McAllen instinctively reached for his Colt, cradling the papoose in his left hand. In a split second he changed his mind. He had killed one Comanche today, and that was one too many. The senseless carnage unfolding around him made him ashamed of his own kind. So he left the Colt in his belt and raised the papoose over his head.
At the last moment, as he reached McAllen, Gray Wolf dropped the war club and plucked the papoose which carried his infant son from the white man's hands. His pony thundered on, and he looked back once, to see a Texas Ranger stumble, bleeding, from his own tepee. He saw McAllen turn and hurl the Ranger to the ground, his face twisted with rage and hate. Then Gray Wolf understood. One white man had killed his beloved Snow Dancer. She would not have allowed herself to be separated from the papoose. He did not need to see her body to know the truth. And yet another white man had saved his son's life.
Grieving and confused, Gray Wolf rode north out of the encampment, the fleet mustang carrying him and his motherless child to safety.
Chapter Nine
Sam Houston stood at the window of his room in the Lafayette Hotel in Marion, Alabama. Had anyone been present to study his face they would have thought him on the verge of exploding into a towering rage. John Henry McAllen's letter had arrived today. It was crumpled in Houston's white-knuckled fist.
The Council House fight had occurred five weeks ago, and McAllen's letter was not the first Houston had heard of the affair. But McAllen had provided a great deal more information than the sketchy newspaper items previously available to him. Papers east of the Mississippi did not think much of the whole business—just another scrape between settlers and hostiles on the untamed Texas frontier. But Houston knew how much was at stake. The future of Texas hung in the balance. By the eternal, Mirabeau Lamar ought to be drawn and quartered! What a debacle!
By the eternal. Houston smiled. How many times had he heard his mentor, his idol, and his friend, Andrew Jackson, roar those words when riled? Old Hickory had gone into retirement at his plantation near Nashville, Tennessee, after eight glorious and tumultuous years as president of these United States, an old man whose rail-thin body was worn out by seventy-three years of travail, but whose mind was still sharp as saber steel.
These United States? Houston shook his head. A mental slip. Despite his best effort, Texas remained an independent republic. Annexation had eluded him. And that was a shame, because Texas needed to become part of the United States. There was ample cause to wonder if she would long survive on her own.
A magnificent destiny had aligned Sam Houston's life with Jackson's, and as he stood there gazing down at the street from his hotel window, Houston reminisced. Virginia-born forty-seven years ago, he had moved to Tennessee with his mother and siblings following the death of his father. Farm work was distasteful to him, and he had run away from home to live among the Cherokee Indians for three years. Adopted by Chief Oo-loo-te-ka, he was called The Raven. Later, to pay his debts, he was forced to find work as a schoolteacher, though in large measure he was himself an unlettered backwoodsman.
Then, in 1813, Regular Army recruiters had come to Maryville, Tennessee, where Houston was teaching. By taking a silver dollar from the drumhead, Houston had pledged himself to military service. His mother gave him a musket and his father's ring, the one inscribed with the word HONOR. She had enjoined him never to disgrace the family name. "I had rather all my sons should fill one honorable grave than that one of them should turn his back to save his life. My door is open to brave men. It is eternally shut to cowards."
With the rank of ensign, Houston had distinguished himself at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. Twice wounded, once by arrow, the second time by musket ball, his heroics came to the attention of General Jackson himself. The shoulder wound was still a running sore to this day, and bothered him with nearly as much consistency as the ankle more recently shattered at San Jacinto.
Following military service, Houston had become a lawyer and entered Tennessee politics with Andrew Jackson as his sponsor. Before long, Jackson was president, and Houston was governor of Tennessee. The Raven's future shined with almost blinding intensity.
But then he married Eliza Allen. He was thirty-five, she nineteen and unsure of her feelings. Emotionally still a child, and terribly naive, Eliza was woefully unprepared for the role of a wife, and three months after their marriage the Houstons separated.
Frowning, Sam Houston turned from the window and proceeded to pace the room. Those days had been the most bleak and bitter of his life. He had resigned the governorship and sought refuge among his old friends the Cherokees, forsaking a promising future. Sic transit gloria mundi! Fame was indeed fleeting. A thousand rumors were circulated; his political enemies claimed he had acted in an ungentlemanly fashion toward poor Eliza, and when he refused to answer these charges they "posted" him as a coward, after a custom of the day. He did, however, chivalrously defend Eliza: "If any wretch ever dares to utter a word against the purity of Mrs. Houston I will come back and write the libel in his heart's blood!"
Everyone acquainted with Sam Houston knew this was no idle threat.
Aboard the steamboat Red River, bound for the mighty Mississippi by way of the Cumberland River, he had been standing on deck one day, giving serious thought to hurling himself into the sparkling blue waters below, when he saw an eagle soaring against the blazing yellow orb of a setting sun. The eagle swooped low over his head and screamed defiantly. Suddenly he had known, with a pure conviction, that his destiny lay to the west. A few days later he made the acquaintance of Jim Bowie, the legendary knife fighter and adventurer. Bowie's tales of Texas had filled Houston with wonder and excitement.
Billy Carroll, his political foe, who replaced him as Tennessee's governor, had been heard to say sarcastically, "Poor Houston! Rose like a rocket, and fell like a stick." But Houston had risen again, like a phoenix from the ashes. After a sojourn with the Cherokees he had gone to Texas as President Jackson's agent to report on Indian affairs. To Texas Sam Houston hitched his star. He had led that ragtag army of volunteers to stunning victory at San Jacinto, defeating Santa Anna, the self-styled "Napoleon of the West," and an army of veterans who had recently—and with astonishing brutality—suppressed rebellion in Mexico's southern provinces. Houston had gone on to serve as the first president of the Republic of Texas.