"
"And four thousand men against them?"
"Si. May the Virgin de los Remedios[4] be their help! An
urgent appeal for assistance was sent to Fanning at Goliad.
Senor Navarre, took it on a horse fleet as the wind. You will
see that on the third day he will be smoking in his balcony,
in the way which is usual to him."
[4] The Virgin appealed to in military straits.
"Will Fanning answer the appeal?"
"If the answer be permitted him. But Urrea may prevent. Also
other things."
Santa Anna entered San Antonio on Tuesday the twenty-third of
February, 1836, and by the twenty-seventh the siege had become
a very close one. Entrenched encampments encircled the doomed
men in the Alamo, and from dawn to sunset the bombardment went
on. The tumult of the fight--the hurrying in and out of the
city--the clashing of church bells between the booming of
cannon--these things the Senora and her daughters could hear
and see; but all else was for twelve days mere surmise. But
only one surmise was possible, when it was known that the
little band of defiant heroes were fighting twenty, times
their own number--that no help could come to them--that the
Mexicans were cutting off their water, and that their
provisions were getting very low. The face of Ortiz grew
constantly more gloomy, and yet there was something of triumph
in his tone as he told the miserably anxious women with what
desperate valor the Americans were fighting; and how fatally
every one of their shots told.
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