Page:The War with Mexico, Vol 1.djvu/429

400 or assailed, and on the day following the battle Urrea, a polished ruffian of the distinctive Spanish-American type, broke up a large wagon train with signal atrocity. The rancheros coöperated eagerly in this profitable work, and the result of the battle had little effect upon them, for they had seen the Mexican army come and go at will, and doubtless thought it might appear again. Taylor therefore proceeded to Monterey about the eighth of March, and endeavored to restore order. On the twenty-eighth he reported that quiet had returned; but three weeks later, though he believed that Urrea and his regulars had withdrawn beyond the Sierra Madre, he admitted that bands of robbers were still very numerous.

Nor was the panic limited to this region. Almost equal alarm prevailed in the United States. "The sympathy of every human being is elicited," wrote Brooke at New Orleans; and the government itself, hurrying off recruits and authorizing Brooke to accept new volunteers, awaited in "painful suspense" the result of Santa Anna's advance. The tidings of his failure, exaggerated of course into news of a brilliant and overwhelming triumph won by a general robbed of his troops, caused a tremendous rebound. Polk, holding that only Taylor's blundering and violation of orders had created the peril, and that his brave men had rescued him from it, would not permit a general salute in the army; but the nation saluted, and the General's nomination for the Presidency became inevitable.