Ned was on watch near one of the lower walls about the plaza. He wrapped
his useful serape closely about his body and the lower part of his face
in order to protect himself from the cold and wet, and the broad brim of
his sombrero was drawn down to meet it. The other Texans on guard were
protected in similar fashion, and in the flitting glimpses that Ned
caught of them they looked to him like men in disguise.
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.
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