, who had followed as soon as they noticed the flight of the
prisoner, fired his musket. The discharge roared in the room, but the
bullet struck the wall fully a foot away from the target. Ned was on the
second floor, and out of range the next moment. He knew that the
soldiers would follow him, and he passed through the great hole, broken
by the Texans, into the next house.

Here he paused to listen, and he heard the two soldiers muttering and
breathing heavily. The distaste which they already felt for their task
had become a deep disgust. Why should they be deprived of their part in
the festival to follow up a prisoner? What did a single captive amount
to, anyhow? Even if he escaped now the great, the illustrious Santa
Anna, whose eyes saw all things, would capture him later on when he
swept all the scattered Texans into his basket.

Ned went from house to house through the holes broken in the party
walls, and occasionally he heard his pursuers slouching along and
grumbling. At the fourth house he slipped out upon the roof, and lay
flat near the stone coping.

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