He knew that if the soldiers came upon the roof they would find him, but he relied upon the mescal and their lack of zeal.  He heard them once tramping about in the room below him, and then he heard them no more.

Ned remained all the rest of the afternoon upon the roof, not daring to leave his cramped position against the coping.  He felt absolutely safe there from observation, Mexicans would not be prowling through dismantled and abandoned houses at such a time.  Now and then gay shouts came from the streets below.  The Mexicans of Bexar were disturbed little by the great numbers of their people who had fallen at the Alamo.  The dead were from the far valleys of Mexico, and were strangers.

Ned afterward thought that he must have slept a little toward twilight, but he was never sure of it.  He saw the sun set, and the gray and silent Alamo sink away into the darkness.  Then he slipped from the roof, anxious to be away before the town was illuminated.  He had no difficulty at all in passing unnoticed through the streets, and he made his way straight for the Alamo.

He was reckoning very shrewdly now.  He knew that the superstitious Mexicans would avoid the mission at night as a place thronged with ghosts, and that Santa Anna would not need to post any guard within those walls.  He would pass through the inclosures, then over the lower barriers by which the Mexicans had entered, and thence into the darkness beyond.

It seemed to him the best road to escape, and he had another object also in entering the Alamo.  The defenders had had three or four rifles apiece, and he was convinced that somewhere in the rooms he would find a good one, with sufficient ammunition.

It was with shudders that he entered the Alamo, and the shudders came again when he looked about the bloodstained courts and rooms, lately the scene of such terrible strife, but now so silent.  In a recess of the church which had been used as a little storage place by himself and Crockett he found an excellent rifle of the long-barreled Western pattern, a large horn of powder and a pouch full of bullets.  There was also a supply of dried beef, which he took, too.

Now he felt himself a man again.  He would find the Texans and then they would seek vengeance for the Alamo.  He crossed the Main Plaza, dropped over the low wall and quickly disappeared in the dusk.

CHAPTER XIV

THE NEWS OF THE FALL

Five days before the fall of the Alamo a little group of men began to gather at the village of Washington, on the Brazos river in Texas.  The name of the little town indicated well whence its people had come.  All the houses were new, mostly of unpainted wood, and they contained some of the furniture of necessity, none of luxury.  The first and most important article was the rifle which the Texans never needed more than they did now.