“Hooray!” Hannibal and Jerry cheered.
The sand hills were being occupied by officers and men, gathered to watch the show. The best point seemed to be awarded to a special little group—
“Say! We’ll have to take another,” Hannibal exclaimed. “There’s General Scott, again—and his engineers, too. We’ll get as close as we can. Wait. They’re coming down. You mind your eye and I’ll show you a fine officer.” The group, with the commanding figure of General Scott to the fore, gazing through glasses, seemed about to leave. “You see that officer who’s just turned our way? Talking to another officer? He’s Captain Robert E. Lee, of the engineers, on Scott’s staff. He laid out these trenches and batteries—he’s the smartest engineer in the army. The officer he’s talking to is Lieutenant George B. McClellan, graduated from West Point only last summer. I know him—I knew him when we all were under Old Zach, in the north of Mexico, before we came here with Fuss and Feathers. He’s smart, too, but he gets funny sometimes. Captain Lee is the smartest of all.”
Upon leaving their hill the group passed nearer. Jerry might see that Captain Lee was a slender, dark-eyed, handsome young officer; Lieutenant McClellan was not so good-looking—had a long nose and a pinched face, and a careless, happy-go-lucky manner; was slight of build. General Scott towered over them all. What a giant of a man he was—and with what a voice when he spoke in measured sentences!
They mounted horses held by orderlies, and cantered away, probably for headquarters where General Scott’s large tent stood, back of the First Division camp.
Jerry and Hannibal climbed to the crest of the sand hill. The evening had fallen; the west was pink, and the tops of the sand hills and the towers of the city glowed, but the dusk was gathering on the plain and over the gulf. Down in the plain the mortars were firing slowly, as before, one after another, as if timed by a clock; and the city and the castle were replying in same fashion. As the dusk deepened the bombs could be seen. They rose high, sailed on, leaving a streak of red from their burning fuses, and dropped swiftly—and all the city was lighted luridly by the burst of flame.
The Mexican shells crossed their tracks with other streaks of red; and they, also, burst with great lurid explosions, illuminating the sand hills and the dark lines of trenches below. Sometimes there were four and five bombs in the air at the same time, going and coming.
It was a grand sight, from the outside. Jerry was glad that he was not in Vera Cruz; and he was glad that he was not one of the soldiers in those little detachments that now and again hustled silently through the hills, to enter the trenches, and do outpost duty and repair the works, under fire.
“Guess to-morrow the army heavies will be helping the navy thirty-twos and sixty-eights,” Hannibal remarked. “Then we’ll have the walls breached, and we’ll all go in and capture the whole shebang. General Scott won’t sit around here, waiting. He’ll storm the walls and have the business over with before the yellow fever starts up. We’ve got to get away from this low country.”