The time went on very slowly.  In the look backward every hour in the Alamo seemed to him as ten.  He walked back and forth a long time, occasionally meeting other sentinels, and exchanging a few words with them.  Once he glanced at their cattle, which were packed closely under a rough shed, where they lay, groaning with content.  Then he went back to the wall and noticed the dim figure of one of the sentinels going toward the convent yard and the church.

Ned took only a single glance at the man, but he rather envied him.  The man was going off duty early, and he would soon be asleep in a warm place under a roof.  He did not think of him again until a full hour later, when he, too, going off duty, saw a figure hidden in serape and sombrero passing along the inner edge of the plaza.  The walk and figure reminded him of the man whom he had seen an hour before, and he wondered why any one who could have been asleep under shelter should have returned to the cold and rain.

He decided to follow, but the figure flitted away before him down the plaza and toward the lowest part of the wall.  This was doubly curious.  Moreover, it was ground for great suspicion.  Ned followed swiftly.  He saw the figure mounting the wall, as if to take position there as a sentinel, and then the truth came to him in a flash.  It was Urrea playing the congenial role of spy.

Ned rushed forward, shouting.  Urrea turned, snatched a pistol and fired.  The bullet whistled past Ned’s head.  The next moment Urrea dropped over the wall and fled away in the darkness.  The other sentinels were not able to obtain a shot at him.

CHAPTER XI

THE DESPERATE DEFENCE

Ned’s report created some alarm among the defenders of the Alamo, but it passed quickly.

“I don’t see just how it can help ’em,” said Crockett.  “He’s found out that we’re few in number.  They already knew that.  He’s learned that the Alamo is made up of a church an’ other buildings with walls ‘roun’ them.  They already knew that, too, an’ so here we all are, Texans an’ Mexicans, just where we stood before.”

Nevertheless, the bombardment rose to a fiercer pitch of intensity the next day.  The Mexicans seemed to have an unlimited supply of ammunition, and they rained balls and shells on the Alamo.  Many of the shells did not burst, and the damage done was small.  The Texans did not reply from the shelter of their walls for a long time.  At last the Mexicans came closer, emboldened perhaps by the thought that resistance was crushed, and then the Texan sharpshooters opened fire with their long-barreled rifles.

The Texans had two or three rifles apiece, and they poured in a fast and deadly fire.  So many of the Mexicans fell that the remainder retreated with speed, leaving the fallen behind them.  But when the smoke lifted others came forward under a white flag, and the Texans allowed them to take away their dead.