“In with you!” were the orders; and through doorway and hole dived, pell-mell, the column. Breathless, but with not a man harmed, they swarmed through the rooms.
The house was empty, but the couches were still warm from recent bodies, and articles of wearing apparel were scattered here and there. The family evidently had fled in their night garments.
“We certainly smoked ’em out,” remarked Jim, as he and Ernest were borne onward by the rush of the men seeking positions.
It did not take long to occupy the house. Some doors had been locked as the family fled, but these were battered down in short order. Window shutters were pierced and loopholes hacked in the mortar, and squads stationed at these, and on the roof. By the crackling, increasing fire at the left, was it known that the Johnson column had broken into the big house opposite, across Soledad Street; the house of Don Juan Veramendi, former vice-governor of Coahuila and Texas, whose daughter Jim Bowie had married!
Now gray daylight had arrived, and rifles were cracking ever more briskly, as the Texans from their roofs and loopholes sought to pick off the Mexican gunners at the street ends, and replied to the Mexican musketeers on the other roof-tops. The reports from the direction of the Alamo had lessened, as if Colonel Neill had withdrawn, after his feint to distract attention from the attack on Bejar. The two cannon brought into town also were silent. The twelve-pounder had been fired once or twice and then had been knocked off its carriage by the Mexican cannon; and the six-pounder could not be served without some sort of a barricade to protect its gunners.
“Well, we’re in, anyhow,” asserted Jim, as with Ernest he peered through their loophole, trying to find a mark. “We’ll just keep burrowing along.”
“How far to the plazas?” asked Ernest.
“Not far. Only about a block, where that church tower is. Jiminy! See the flag on it? Red flag! That means no quarter. But we don’t care.”
The low-ceilinged room was hazy with choking powder-smoke, and Ernest’s eyes and throat smarted. The loophole did not seem very well located for shooting, although in other rooms the men were busy.
“Let’s go up on top a minute,” he proposed.