ged piece down, to pick up its
successor.

He crouched there on the flat roof facing the Mexican cannon. As fast
as men came to load it, he fired. Sometimes a dozen soldiers rushed
upon the muzzle of the field-piece surrounding it. At such moments
Davy Crockett's arms swept back and forth with smooth unhurried
swiftness and his sinewy fingers relaxed from one walnut stock only to
clutch another; his hands were never empty. Always a little red flame
licked the smoke fog before him like the tongue of an angered snake.
He was getting on in years but in all his full life his technic had
never been so perfect, his artistry of death so flawless, as on this
day which prefaced the closing of his chapter. The bodies of his
enemies clogged the space about their cannon; the rivulets of red
trickled from the heap across the roadway. The long hours passed.
Darkness came. The field-piece remained silent.

Long before daylight the next morning the four thousand were marching
in close ranks to gather for the final assault. The sun had not risen
when they made the charge. The infantry came first; the cavalry closed
in behind them driving them on with bared sabers. The Americans took
such toll with their long-barreled rifles from behind the barricaded
doors and windows that the foot-soldiers turned to face the naked
swords rather than endure that fire. The officers reformed them under
cover; they swept forward again, and again fell back. Santa Ana
directed the third charge in person. They swarmed to the courtyard
wall and raised ladders to its summit. The men behind bore those
before them onward and literally shoved them up the ladders. They
overwhelmed the frontiersmen through sheer force of numbers. Colonel
W. B. Travis fell fighting hand to hand here. The courtyard filled
with dark-skinned soldiers.

The Alamo was fallen. But there remained for the lean hard-bitten men
of Texas, who had retired within the adobe buildings, the task of
dying as fighting men should die. It was now ten o'clock, nearly six
hours since the beginning of the first advance. It took the four
thousand two hours more to finish the thing.

For every room saw its separate stand; and every stand was to the
bitter end.

There were fourteen gaunt frontiersmen in the hospital, so weak with
wounds that they could not drag themselves from their tattered
blankets. They fought with rifles and pistols until forty Mexicans lay
heaped dead about the doorway. The artill