[concluding chapter 19]
“That might be sufficient,” Travis said. His eyes narrowed, and Stewart got the impression of a man distracted by a sudden idea.
“If you have a message you wish delivered to our government,” Stewart said, “I can do that for you through General Lee.”
“A message.” The words were more expelled than enunciated. “Yes, I think I might want to send a message to your country from my country.”
Then Travis’s eyes widened and he was suddenly alert again. “And it is a country,” he said. Now he was smiling, and Stewart felt confused at this abrupt change in demeanor. “It took an effort of will to imagine it a country a week ago,” Travis continued, “but you and your George Patton and William Walker have changed that. I really suppose I ought to thank you.”
In spite of himself—you’d be smarter to keep your mouth shut, he thought—Stewart said, “I’m afraid I don’t understand you, sir.”
“You should thank God that you don’t,” he said, and Stewart was briefly afraid. For a moment Travis was silent, and Stewart heard a lamp-flame gutter.
“You’re a Virginian,” Travis said, and Stewart found himself nodding automatically, as though the man had said something of significance. “You come from a place that has two hundred years of history to it, and a lineage that goes back even further thanks to the mother from which your country sprang. No Virginian would doubt that Virginia has a right to exist, or to defend that right as your fellows are doing right now at Fredericksburg and in Kentucky.
“Texas isn’t like that, Stewart. Or it wasn’t, until you arrived. Texas was a Mexican province that had thrown out its landlord, and that was about the extent of it. Our president is an enthusiastic drunkard, our politicians think that the way to counter an argument is with a well-aimed wad of chewing tobacco or even a knife, and our people come from every spot on God’s earth. We have been a blank slate on which people like Preston Brooks or Thomas Reynolds or William Walker could write their own vision of Texas. Most of those visions seemed to involve us being a subset of something—or someone—else.”
Travis paused and took a long drink, emptying his glass. Stewart had heard from Cleburne that the Texas secretary of state had once been a lawyer, and now he knew that to be true. The man liked to talk. To be fair, Stewart thought, he’s doing a passable job of keeping me interested.
“After we finished with those people on the creek up there,” Travis said after lighting a cigar, “I overheard some of the militiamen talking. These fellows are plantation owners, farmers—the sorts of men who might be considered to have a stake in the future of a place.” The sorts of men, Stewart thought, that my father admires. “To a one,” Travis said, “these men were outraged at what Walker had tried to do to us. To us, mind you. That’s the word they used. They had started thinking of Texas as more than just the place in which they, as individual men, live.”
Now Travis was pacing the room, his face wreathed in smoke and his mouth curved in an ever-widening grin. “You—you in helping, Walker in making it necessary for you to help—did this for us,” he said, “in a way that Santa Anna couldn’t. He was just a Mexican, after all, and the average Texican thinks he’s the worth of any ten Mexicans. But William Walker! And with the weight of the Confederate States behind him!” Travis stopped in front of the seat on which Stewart somehow found himself sitting on the edge. “I’m a southern man myself, Captain Stewart. I grew up in Kentucky, and married and fathered a child in Alabama. Like many of the men who led the revolution against Mexico, I think that somewhere in the back of my heart I always hoped to bring Texas back into the embrace of the United States. I don’t think that’s going to happen, now.
“I certainly don’t feel that urge any more, at any rate.
“So, by God, you go back to your General Lee or your family in Virginia and you do whatever it is that you have to do to punish the men who did this to you”—there was an unpleasantly exaggerated emphasis, Stewart thought, on that last word—“and to us. I will see to it that the Republic of Texas never forgets how our brothers in the South have repaid us for our loyalty to the land that gave us birth. Your uncle and your William Walker set out to make us a part of your nation—and you ended up making us a nation unto ourselves.”
He laughed. Returning to his chair he poured more Bourbon into his glass. “I can hardly wait to talk to Lord Pakenham,” he said.
Next Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six
Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen
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