had received warning already – sufficient to stimulate them to the utmost caution?
Moreover, the Jarocho would be in his own village, surrounded by his friends – I saw he had friends. What danger, then, either to himself or to his sister?
My apprehensions were unreasonable; and perhaps my horse had been saddled as much from another motive which I need not declare.
She might comprehend it, and to my prejudice – perhaps deem me importunate? She must have known all that I could tell her – perhaps more! Ah! true. She might not thank me for my interference.
As I stood hesitating between these two conflicting emotions, I was admonished that the hour was nigh, at which we had been ordered to strike tents, and march to join the head-quarters of the American army, by this time established in the town of Jalapa.
My troopers were forming on the field, preparatory to taking the route; and this among other motives decided my course of action.
Just as the sun had reached his meridian height, the bugler sounded the “forward!” and riding at the head of my little troop, I bade adieu to Cerro Gordo, now sacred to the god of war, but in my mind to remain hallowed as the spot upon which I had worshipped a far more agreeable divinity.
Story 1, Chapter XV
Two Old Acquaintances
Up the road from Cerro Gordo we travelled upon the track of a routed army.
All had not made good their retreat, as was evidenced by many a sad spectacle that came under our eyes as we went onward.
Here lay the dead horse, sunblown to enormous dimensions, with one lag – a hind one – stiffly projecting into the air.
Not far off might be seen the corpse of his quondam rider, in like manner swollen – bloated to the very tips of the fingers – so that the latter scarcely protruded from the palms, that more resembled boxing-gloves than the hands of a human being!
Though only thirty hours had elapsed from the time that life had left them, this curious transformation had become complete. It was owing to the tropical sun, which for the whole of the previous day had been fiercely glaring upon the bodies.
I noted, as we passed, that our slain enemies had not been unheeded. All appeared, since death, to have been visited, and attended to – not for the purpose of interment, but of plunder.
Everything of value found upon the corpses had been stripped off; in the case of some, even to their vestments.
A few were stark naked – their swollen shining skins displaying the gore-encircled embouchure of sabre or shot-wound; and it was only those whose torn uniforms were saturated with black blood, who had been permitted to retain the rags that enveloped them – now stretched to such a tight fit, that it would have been an impossibility to have completed the process of stripping.
To the credit of the pursuing army be it told, that this ruthless spoliation was not the work of the American soldier. A part of it may have been performed by the stragglers of that army – in nine cases out of ten a European hireling – French, Irish, or German. Myself an Irishman, I can scarcely be charged with partiality in this statement. Alas! for the land of my nativity – whose moral sense has too long suffered from the baneful taint of monarchical tyranny! I but set forth the facts as I saw them.
It was no great consolation to know, that much of that spoilation had been done by Mexicans themselves – the patrolled prisoners, who had gone up the road before us.
The same deteriorating influence had been at work upon their moral principles for a like period of time; and the intermittent glimpses they had got of a republic, had been too evanescent to have left behind much trace of its civilising power.
As we rode onward among the unburied dead, I was impressed by a singular circumstance. The corpse of no Mexican appeared to have suffered mutilation; while that of an American soldier, who had fallen by some stray shot, was stripped of its flesh – almost to the making a skeleton of it!
It was the work of wolves – we had no doubt about that. We several times saw the coyotes skulking under the edge of the chapparal, and at a greater distance the gaunt form of the large Mexican wolf. We saw great holes eaten in the hips of horses and mules; but not a scratch upon the corpse of a Mexican soldier!
“Why is it?” I asked of a singular personage who was riding immediately behind me, unattached to my troop, and whose experience over Texan and New Mexican battlefields I presumed would help me to an explanation. “Why is it that the wolves have left their bodies untouched?”
“Wagh!” exclaimed the individual thus interrogated, with an expression of scornful disgust suddenly overspreading his features. “Wolves eat ’em! No – nor coyot’s neyther. A coyot won’t eat skunk; an’ I reck’n thur karkidges aint less bitterer than the meat o’ a skunk.”
“You think there’s something in their flesh that the wolves don’t relish – something different from that of other people?”
“Think! I’m sartin sure o’t. I’ve see’d ’em die whar we killed ’em – when the Texans made their durned foolish expedishun northart to Santa Fé. I’ve seed ’em lyin’ out in the open paraira, for hul weeks at a time, till they had got dry as punk – jest like them things they bring from somewhar way out t’other side of the world. Durn it, I dis-remember the name o’ the place, an’ the things themselves. You know what I’m trackin’ up, Bill Garey? We seed ’em last time we wur at Sant Looey – in that ere queery place, whur they’d got Ingun things, an’ stuffed bufflers, an’ the like.”
“Mummeries?” replied the person thus appealed to, another unattached member of the corps of rifle-rangers. “Are that what you’re arter, old Rube?”
“Preezackly, Bill Mum’ries; ay, the name war that – I reccolex it. They gits the critters out o’ large stone buildin’s, shaped same as the rockly islands we seed, when we were trappin’ that lake out t’ords California.”
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