Page:Into Mexico with General Scott (1920).djvu/276

 It was the word for the First Brigade at last.

Chapultepec had opened with a plunging fire into the valley. The First Brigade sped steadily down the slope for the smoking King's Mill.

"Charge—bayonets! Run!"

And run they all did, with a yell, Jerry and the drummers and fifers pelting behind, the officers to the fore, Drum's battery following by the road. Grape and canister and musket ball met them; men fell; the firing was worse than that of the bridgehead at Churubusco, but the Fourth Regiment luckily found itself in an angle of the wall surrounding the mill yard and could rally under protection. The enemy was inside, sheltered by the walls of the mill buildings and by sandbag parapets upon the flat roofs. The shouting and the rapid firing announced thousands of Mexicans.

All the bright morning was dulled by powder and rent by the cheering, the yelling, and the continuous reports of muskets and cannon. From the angle of the wall where the Fourth crouched, the battlefield to the west stretched full in view—the soldiers charging down across it, staggering, limping, crumpling, but closing ranks as they tore on, their bayonets set. The Cadwalader reinforcements and the Light Battalion had mingled with the shattered Wright column; they were bearing on together, and disappeared in the cactus-fringed trenches. What of Hannibal, Jerry wondered.

But here was Drum's battery section, dragged forward by hand to a nearer position in the road. It scarcely had been pointed and the linstocks applied to the touch holes when every gunner was swept