Ned felt an extreme dizziness.  All his old strength had not yet returned, and after such furious action and so much excitement there was a temporary collapse.  He lay back on the grass, closed his eyes, and waited for the weakness to pass.  He heard around him the talk and murmur of the men, and the sounds of new preparations.  He heard the recruits telling one another that they had repulsed four Mexican attacks, and that they could repulse four more.  Yet the amount of talking was not great.  The fighting had been too severe and continuous to encourage volubility.  Most of them reloaded in silence and waited.

Ned felt that his weakness had passed, opened his eyes, and sat up again.  He saw that the Mexicans had drawn a circle of horsemen about them, but well beyond range.  Behind the horsemen their army waited.  Fannin’s men were rimmed in by steel, and Ned believed that Urrea, after his great losses in the charges, would now wait.

Ned stretched himself and felt his muscles.  He was strong once more and his head was clear.  He did not believe that the weakness and dizziness would come again.  But his tongue and throat were dry, and one of the youths who had stood with him gave him a drink from his canteen.  Ned would gladly have made the drink a deep one, but he denied himself, and, when he returned the canteen, its supply was diminished but little.  He knew better than the giver how precious the water would become.

Ned was standing at the edge of the hollow, and his head was just about on a level with the surrounding prairie.  After his look at the Mexican circle, something whistled by his ear.  It was an unpleasant sound that he knew well, one marking the passage of a bullet, and he dropped down instantly.  Then he cautiously raised himself up again, and, a half dozen others who had heard the shot did the same.  One rose a little higher than the rest and he fell back with a cry, a bullet in his shoulder.

Ned was surprised and puzzled.  Whence had come these shots?  There was the line of Mexican cavalry, well out of range, and, beyond the horsemen, were the infantry.  He could see nothing, but the wounded shoulder was positive proof that some enemy was near.

There was a third crack, and a man fell to the bottom of the hollow, where he lay still.  The bullet had gone through his head.  Ned saw a wreath of smoke rising from a tiny hillock, a hundred yards away, and then he saw lifted for only a moment a coppery face with high cheek bones and coarse black hair.  An Indian!  No one could ever mistake that face for a white man’s.  Many more shots were fired and he caught glimpses of other faces, Indian in type like the first.

Every hillock or other inequality of the earth seemed to spout bullets, which were now striking among the Texans, cooped up in the hollow, killing and wounding.  But the circle of Mexican horsemen did not stir.

“What are they?” called Fannin, who was lying upon a pallet, suffering greatly from his wound.