Ahead of the Army Part 11

"Father Crawford," exclaimed one of the grown-up young men, "what is this about another letter from Edward? I came over to hear the news."

"Letter?" said Mr. Crawford. "I should say so! I guess I'd better read it aloud. It was a long time getting out and coming around by way of England. There are all sorts of delays in war-time. It is the last of three that he wrote before escaping into the interior of Mexico with his new friends. I am glad that he did go with them, though, and there must be other letters on the way. We shall hear from him again pretty soon."

They all were silent then, and he read the letter through, with now and then a few words of explanation, but Mrs. Crawford had evidently read it before, and all she could say now was:

"Oh, dear! I don't like it! I wish he had come home!"

"It's all right, mother," said Mr. Crawford, "for I have something more to tell. Captain Kemp is here, and, from what he says, it is plain that it would not have done for Ned to have remained anywhere on the coast.

He will be safe where he is, and he will learn a great deal. I would not have him miss it for anything. What's pretty good, too, we have been paid all our insurance money for the loss of the _Goshhawk_, and our firm has been given a contract to furnish supplies for the army. I shall be down on the gulf before long myself, in charge of a supply ship, and I can make inquiries about Ned. He will turn up all right."

Everybody appeared to be encouraged except Ned's mother, and it was a pity she could not have seen how well he was looking at that very time.

If, for instance, she had possessed a telescope which would have reached so far, she might have seen a fine, large bay horse reined in to a standstill in front of a modern-appearing country-house, well built of a nearly white kind of limestone. Around this residence was a wide-spreading lawn, with vines, shrubbery, flowers, and other evidences of wealth and refinement. The rider of the horse appeared to sit him easily, and he was a picture of health and high spirits, but for an expression of discontent that was upon his sunburned face.

"This is all very beautiful," he said, as he glanced around him, "but I wish I were out of it. I want to hear from home. They must have my letters by this time, but they couldn't guess where I am now."

He was silent for a moment, and the horse curveted gracefully under him, as if in doubt whether to gallop away again, or to ask his rider to get off.

"Well!" said Ned, with a pull on the rein. "It seems like a long, wonderful dream since I saw General Zuroaga ride away from us at the cross-roads. What a skirmish that was! Then we made our way through the mountains, and came here, and hasn't it been a curious kind of life ever since? I've learned how to ride like a Mexican. I've seen all there is to see for miles and miles around this place. I've seen lots of old ruins, all that's left of ancient houses and temples and altars. I believe the senora likes nothing better than to tell me yarns about the Montezuma times and about her ancestors in Spain. That's a great country. I think I'll go over there, some day, and see Granada and the Alhambra and the old castles and the Spanish people. I like the Mexicans first-rate, all that I have seen of them. They will be a splendid nation one of these days, but they're awfully ignorant now. Why, every one in these parts believes that our army is all the while being whipped all to pieces by theirs, and I can't exactly swallow that. I'd like to know just what is really going on. I'm all in the dark."

"Senor Carfora!" called out a clear, ringing voice.

He turned in the saddle, from seeming to gaze at the distant forest, and there, in the piazza which ran all along the front of the house, stood Senorita Felicia, her usually pale face flushed with excitement.

"We have a letter from father!" she shouted. "He has completed his regiment, and he is to command it. President Paredes is going north, to drive the gringos out of Mexico, and father may have to go with him. He says it is time for us to move to the city of Mexico. We are to live with my aunt, Mercedes Paez, and you are to come with us. Is it not grand?"

"It is just what I was wishing for!" exclaimed Ned. "I'd give almost anything to see that city, after what your mother has told me."

"Oh," said Felicia, "she was born there, and she'll make you see all there is of it. But we were all ready, you know, and we are to set out early to-morrow morning."

"Hurrah!" responded Ned. "But I'd like to hear from General Zuroaga. I wish I knew whether or not he was much hurt in that fight in the road."

"Father does not believe he was," said Felicia. "Sometimes I almost think he knows all about it. But there are some things he won't speak of, and General Zuroaga is one of them."

Ned sprang to the ground, and a barefooted "peon" servant took charge of his horse. It was not at all the kind of dismounting he had performed at the camp in the woods on the road from Vera Cruz. Neither did he now have any machete dangling from his belt, to entangle himself with, and there were no pistol holsters in front of the saddle. He went on into the house with the senorita, and in a moment more he was hearing additional news from her mother. Senora Ta.s.sara was as stately as ever, but it was apparent that she had taken a liking to her young American guest, whether it was on account of his deep interest in her old stories, or otherwise. It may have been, in part, that company was a good thing to have in a somewhat lonely country-house, for she could not have thought of a.s.sociating with Mexican neighbors of a social rank lower than her own. Was she not descended from Spanish grandees, and were they not, for the greater part, representatives of the mere Aztecs and Toltecs, whom her forefathers had conquered? It was that very feeling, however, which in the minds of such men as Paredes and similar leaders was standing in the way of every effort to construct a genuine republic out of the people of the half-civilized States of Mexico.

Ned's next questions related to the war, and he inquired how many more great battles Colonel Ta.s.sara had reported.

"Battles?" exclaimed Senora Ta.s.sara. "Why, there has not been one fought since Resaca de la Palma. But he says that General Ampudia sends word that the American army is about to advance upon him. They will attack him at the city of Monterey, and they never can take so strong a place as that is. He is ready for them, but President Paredes believes that it is time for him to take command of the army in person."

It certainly was so. The Mexican President was a cunning politician, and he had been by no means an unsuccessful general. He was well aware that it would not be wise for him to now allow too many victories to be won by any other Mexican. It might interfere with his own popularity. On the other hand, if General Ampudia should be defeated, as he was quite likely to be, then it was good policy for the commander-in-chief, the President, to be promptly on hand with a larger force, to overwhelm the invaders who had ruined Ampudia. Therefore, it might be said that the Americans had the tangled factions and corrupt politics of Mexico working for them very effectively.

Ned Crawford already knew much about the condition of military and political affairs, but he was not thinking of them that evening. It was a great deal pleasanter to sit and talk with Senorita Felicia about the city of Mexico and others of the historical places of the ancient land of Anahuac. She still could remind him, now and then, that she hated all kinds of gringos, but at all events she was willing to treat one of them fairly well. He, on his part, had formed a favorable opinion of some Mexicans, but he was as firm as ever in his belief that their army could never drive the Americans out of Texas.

There was one place which was even busier and more full of the excitement of getting ready for a new movement than was the Ta.s.sara hacienda. It was among the scattered camps of General Taylor's army, near Matamoras, at the mouth of the Rio Grande. Reinforcements had made the army more than double its former size, but it was understood that it was still of only half the numbers of the force it was soon to meet, under General Ampudia. It was a curious fact, however, that all of General Taylor's military scholars were entirely satisfied with that computation, and considered that any other arrangement would have been unfair, as they really outnumbered their opponents when these were only two to one. What was more, they were willing to give them the advantage of fighting behind strong fortifications, for they knew that they were soon to attack the mountain city of Monterey. Part of what was now genuinely an invading army was to go up the river in boats for some distance. The other part was to go overland, and it was an open question which of them would suffer the more from the hot summer sun. It was to be anything but a picnic, for here were nearly seven thousand Americans of all sorts, who were obtaining their first experiences of what war might really be, if made in any manner whatever in the sultriest kind of southern weather. Much more agreeable for them might have been a march across the central table-lands beyond, at an elevation of four thousand feet above the sea level and the _tierra caliente_.

That was precisely the kind of pleasant journey that was performed by Ned Crawford and the imposing Ta.s.sara cavalcade on the morrow and during a couple of wonderful days which followed. There being no railway, whatever the senora wished to take with her had to be conveyed in wagons or on pack-mules, and the ladies themselves now preferred the saddle to any kind of carriage. In fact, Ned shortly discovered that Senorita Felicia was more at home on horseback than he was, and he more than once congratulated himself that she had never witnessed his first performances in mounting his fat pony.

"How she would have laughed at me!" he thought. "But at that time there wasn't another spare saddle-horse, and she and her mother didn't care a cent whether I could ride or not. They were thinking of Guerra's lancers."

The scenery was exceedingly beautiful as well as peaceful. There was nothing whatever to suggest that a dreadful war was going on. There were houses of friends to stop at, instead of hotels. There were towns and villages of some importance to be rapidly investigated by a tourist like Ned, from New York by way of England, and now a good young Mexican for the time being. Then there was an exciting evening, when all who were on horseback rode ahead of the wagons and on into the city, which occupies the site of the wonderful Tenocht.i.tlan, which was captured by Hernando Cortes and his daring adventurers ever so long ago. From that time onward, during a number of busy days, Ned became better and better satisfied with the fact that his father had sent him across the sea to learn all that he could of Mexico and the Mexicans.

CHAPTER X.

PICTURES OF THE PAST

"Oh, how I wish we had some news from the war!" exclaimed Ned.

"Well," said Senorita Felicia, doubtfully, "there isn't much, but I suppose there is some almost ready to come."

"I'm tired of waiting for it," replied Ned, "and if there isn't to be any war news, I wish I had some books!"

The thought that was in Ned Crawford's mind had broken out suddenly, as he sat at the dinner-table of Senora Mercedes Paez, at the end of those first days after his arrival in the city of Mexico. There were a number of persons at the table, and at the head of it was Senora Paez herself.

She was shorter and stouter, but she was every ounce as stately and imposing as was even Senora Ta.s.sara. In front of her sat one affair which had, from the beginning of his visit in that house, made him feel more at home than he might otherwise have done. He had become used to it, and it seemed like an old friend. That Seville coffee-urn had ornamented the table in the house at Vera Cruz, his first refuge after he came ash.o.r.e out of the destructive norther. It had winked at him from a similar post of honor in the country-house out in Puebla, and Senora Ta.s.sara had affectionately brought it with her to the residence of her city cousin. She had said that she thought it would be safer here, even if the city should be captured by those terrible robbers, the Americans.

They could not be intending to steal and melt up all the old silver in Mexico.

"Why, Senor Carfora!" exclaimed Senorita Felicia, indignantly. "Did you not know? Aunt Paez has piles and piles of books. They are up in the library. If you wish to read them, she will let you go there. I had forgotten that you know how to read. He may do it, may he not, Aunt Mercedes?"

"Of course he may," replied the senora, "but it is a curious idea for a boy of his age."

"Oh, thank you!" exclaimed Ned. "But what I'd like to have are some books that tell about old Mexico and about the city of Tenocht.i.tlan, that stood here before the Spaniards came. I've been all around everywhere. I've seen the swamps and the lakes and the walls and forts and everything. The great cathedral--"

"That," interposed Senora Ta.s.sara, "stands on the very spot where an old temple of the Aztec war-G.o.d stood. There were altars in it, where they used to kill and burn hundreds and thousands of human sacrifices to Huitzilopochtli, and there were altars to other G.o.ds."

"I can't exactly speak that name," said Ned, "but I want to know all about him and the sacrifices. I want to learn, too, just how Cortes and his men took the old city. I suppose that when the Americans come, it will be a different kind of fight--more cannon."

"They won't get here at all," quietly remarked a military-looking old gentleman sitting near the other end of the table. "It is a long road from the Rio Grande, and President Paredes is to march, in a few days, to crush our enemies with an army of twenty thousand men. They have not so much as taken Monterey yet. You are right, though. If they should ever get here, they will find the city harder to take than Cortes did.

They will all die before the walls."

He spoke with a great deal of patriotic enthusiasm, and Ned knew that it was his turn to keep still, for the old gentleman had no idea that he was talking to a wicked young gringo. Senora Paez, however, calmly replied:

"Ah, Colonel Rodriguez, my dear friend, the President himself has said that, after he has beaten them at the northern border, as he surely will, the Americans are sure to make another attempt by way of Vera Cruz. That, too, was the opinion of our brave friend, Colonel Guerra, and he is making every preparation for a siege. It is part of our grateful hospitality to our guest, Senor Carfora, that his friends have supplied the Castle of San Juan de Ulua with the ammunition which will be needed. He came over on the ship which brought it, and he has remained with us ever since."

Just then Ned Crawford knew what it was to feel very mean indeed. He felt as if he himself were telling a large lie, and his cheeks flushed red-hot. He was aware, nevertheless, that even Senora Ta.s.sara had not been told everything, and that Senora Paez was reasonably honest in what she had been saying. There was no necessity for enlightening Colonel Rodriguez. Hardly, therefore, had the old gentleman vehemently exclaimed, "They never can take San Juan de Ulua!" than Ned went hastily back to his first subject of the ancient history.

"That's it," he said. "I want to find out how Cortes got ash.o.r.e, and how he fought his way from the coast to this place. He must have had to cross the mountains, through the pa.s.ses, just as our party did when we came."

"Yes," said the colonel. "He had to climb seven thousand and five hundred feet up out of the _tierra caliente_, and, if any gringos ever try that path, they will find all the pa.s.ses full of fighting Mexicans and good artillery well posted. Hernando Cortes had all the gunpowder there was in America when he tried that road."

"My dear young friend," said Senora Paez, "you will find plenty of the books you wish for. My husband was fond of collecting them. After dinner, the senorita will show you the library, and you may read anything there."

Ned was silent once more, for he was still feeling mean, and was asking himself whether he were not, after all, a kind of spy in the Mexican camp, going around in disguise, and all the while wishing that he could help the American army to capture the city.

"Anyhow," he thought, "I can't help myself just now, and when the city is taken, everything in the Paez house will be entirely safe. I shouldn't wonder if that old coffee-urn will be safer from thieves than it is now. There have been half a dozen burglaries since we came, and I've seen hundreds of the wildest-looking kinds of fellows from the mountains. Every man of them looked as if he'd like to steal some silver."

While he was thinking, he was also listening, with a great deal of interest, to a description which the old officer was giving of the defences of Monterey, and of the reasons why the American troops would surely be defeated. It appeared that he had at one time been the commander of the garrison of the fortress known as the Black Fort, just outside of the walls of Monterey, on the north, and he evidently believed it to be impregnable. Ned was no soldier, and it did not occur to him to ask, as General Taylor might have done, whether or not it was possible to take the town without wasting time in taking the fort first.