“Lad, I’ll never forget that day while there’s a wheeze of breath left in me. We woke up in the morning after a big rain. We were all sopping and chilled. And we found the greasers had made a forced march, and that they’d hemmed us in the big hacienda where we were camped. They had us right in the hollow of their hands. Five to one. And all the advantage of position, too, do you see?
“Old Uncle Zach was sitting on a soap-box in front of his tent, trying to mow a week’s beard with a dull razor. He was barefoot, and in a pair of butternut pants and a red undershirt. Up rides a tailor’s dummy of a Mexican adjutant, under a flag of truce. Looked as if he’d been born in a bandbox. He salutes, haughty like, and asks:
“‘Do I address El Comandante Zaccaria Taylor?’
“‘Uh-huh’ grunts Taylor, scraping away hopeless like at his stiff gray stubble.
“‘The illustrious Generalissimo Santa Anna bids me say to you,’ goes on the tailor’s dummy, ‘that you are irretrievably in his power.’
“‘All right,’ says Uncle Zach, tugging at his razor. ‘Let him come along, then, and get me, if that’s the case. I’m right here.’
“Half an hour later they charged us. It looked like a million-to-one shot, with no takers. Along toward afternoon, when we’d been fighting till we were half-dead, a staff officer said to me:
“‘Taylor’s been beaten to a standstill no less than three times to-day!’
“‘Yes,’ said I, grinning back at him; ‘but he doesn’t know it.’
“And no more he did. By night the Mexican army was smashed like a basket of eggs that have fallen under a road roller.