Page:The War with Mexico, Vol 1.djvu/402

Rh but would have died for him; and while the army would probably have expressed itself about him as lightly as did the street urchins of Philadelphia:

 Old Zack's at Monterey, Bring out your Santa Anner ; For every time we raise a gun, Down goes a Mexicanner ;"

yet in reality he was now enthroned in the hearts of the soldiers generally as a father, a hero and almost a fetich.

Invoked by Wool, then, Taylor — instead of drawing him back, as the government wished — appeared at Saltillo on the first or second of February with about 700 men, and proceeded to occupy the advanced position already mentioned. Believing, as we have seen, that a lack of water on the road from San Luis would prevent any strong body of Mexicans from coming north at that season, and hearing that a great part of Santa Anna's troops had gone toward Vera Cruz, he scouted alarms; and in addition to his other grounds for pushing forward, he thought so doing would tend to restore confidence among the troops and the people of Saltillo. Moreover, although he had ridiculed Scott's intimation thathat [sic] the might be able to manoeuvre toward San Luis in the early spring, he was now planning to do so.

Scrambling out of Saltillo by the southern route, which makes a short but sharp ascent as it leaves the town, Taylor found himself on a rather smooth plateau elevated nearly or quite 6000 feet above the sea, and after a ride of about five miles discovered on the left, near the road, four or five mean adobe buildings, headquarters of the Buena Vista ranch, where Wool's command had recently been in camp. The southern outlook from this point was desolate but noble. On both sides rose high, barren mountains. Those on the west, formed of many rather thin horizontal slabs of rock, slightly concave toward the sky and separated by thicker deposits of a softer material eroded at the edges, formed reddish, flat-topped pyramids like the pictured hanging gardens of Babylon; while those on the other hand were a true sierra, a line of saw-tooth peaks buttressed with sharp spurs. Descending easily for about a mile and a half, the General came to a narrow