Page:Into Mexico with General Scott (1920).djvu/307

 *tured guns of the outer wall were being reversed. The storming squads with the ladders ran, heads down, across the yard for the castle walls; the Voltigeurs and the infantry regiments (the New York company and the Marines, too) fired furiously from cover or in the open, helping the cannon drive the castle defenders from parapets and windows. The clangor was prodigious.

Jerry seemed to see everything at once: the struggling flags, the waving swords of the officers, the figures, rising, falling, rising and charging on; the red caps of the Mexican soldiery and the pompons of the boy cadets fringing the parapets and the windows; the cannon and the muskets smoking, and the bodies now and then sprawling in a lax heap.

Huzzah! Somebody was up—an officer in blue, his head bare, the flag of the Eighth Infantry at his back. He was Second Lieutenant Joseph Selden, of Hannibal's company. A moment he stood, but for only a moment. Down he fell, sweeping his party from the ladder. The wall had been saved. Not for long, though! Huzzah! The great embroidered flag of the castle had drooped; a grape shot had severed its staff. No—it was hoisted again; a slender little fellow—a Mexican military cadet—had wriggled up the staff and refastened the banner. Brave boy! The troops cheered him.

Now there was another, louder cheer. The parapets were being occupied by fighting blue coats. Two flags had been planted: a Voltigeur flag and a New York flag, upon a terrace, by two officers. The Voltigeur officer was Captain Barnard; the New Yorker was said to be Lieutenant Mayne Reid. The