"Perhaps it doesn't run to anywhere," replied Dan. "Go slow, or you may dash your brains out on the rough wall."
They moved along cautiously. The passageway was not over six feet in height and from three to four feet wide. It was uneven, but soon they found themselves going downward and away from the church and convent, as they learned by the muffled noises overhead.
"This is some secret passage put in by the friars, years ago," was Stover's comment, after several hundred feet had been passed. "Like as not they built it to escape in case the Injuns attacked 'em."
"Well, if they did, it must lead to some place of safety," answered Dan. "I sincerely hope it does."
Stover was still suffering great pain, and he had lost so much blood that he could scarcely walk.
"I must rest and try to bind up that wound," he panted, and sank in a dead faint at Dan's feet.
Dan could do nothing in the darkness, and now he resolved to risk a light, and lit the stump of a candle which he usually carried with him when on a hunting expedition. By these feeble rays he bound up the wound as well as he was able and also attended to his own hurt. Then, as Stover gave a long sigh and opened his eyes, he blew out the light.
"Don't make a light ag'in," were the frontiersman's first words. "It may cost us our lives. We will keep still and lay low," and then he became partly unconscious again.
The hours which followed were like some horrible nightmare to Dan, whose nerves had been wrought up to the top notch of excitement by the scenes in the courtyard and the church. From a distance he heard calls and groans and an occasional shot. The Alamo had fallen and now Santa Anna was himself upon the scene, to make certain that not one of the Texans should escape. "I told them what to expect," he is reported to have said, and then, when five men were brought before him, and his own officer, General Castrillon, interceded for the Texans, he gave Castrillon a lecture for his soft-heartedness, and the prisoners were speedily put to the bayonet. Such was Santa Anna, now high in power, but who was destined in time to be shorn of all rank and to die in bitter obscurity. His last act of atrocity at the Alamo was to have the bodies of his victims piled up with layers of brushwood and burned.
The hours passed, how slowly or swiftly neither Dan nor Poke Stover knew. No one came to disturb them, and at length the boy sank into a doze due to his exhausted condition.