A moment later Grays and brigands wheeled to the right and were off. Back at the Casa Blanca Maximilian lowered his glasses. “They surely, they surely are not–yes,” he cried, “they are going to attack the Cimatario!”
Miramon smiled. “Then they are lunatics,” he said. “Why, Your Highness knows that we have five thousand of our best men on the Cimatario.”
“Yes,” Maximilian agreed uneasily, “but I thought I recognized the man who leads those lunatics. Do you happen to know, general, how Tampico fell?”
“Do not worry, sire,” Miramon replied, willing to humor the prince, “I will take our infantry to the Alameda and strengthen our reserve there, should anything really happen.”
Across the grassy plain raced the twelve hundred cavalry and the two hundred outlaws. They raced to attack five thousand brave men who had that morning dislodged ten thousand. Five thousand in the trenches above, fourteen hundred in the open below, such were the odds of Empire against Republic.
394Grays and brigands drew rein under the Cimatario’s west slope, and the bugle sounded to dismount.
“But señor,” Rodrigo protested, “don’t we charge straight up?”
“And not have a man left when we do get up? Here Clem,” Driscoll added to Old Brothers and Sisters, the lieutenant colonel of the Grays, “you circle round and up the other side with eight companies. Take all the horses, but leave ’em back of the hill as you go. Don’t that look like the best scheme?”
The parson’s cherubic features beamed. “Good-bye, Din,” he said. “But pshaw, I reckon–I reckon we’ll be meeting up above.” He referred, however, to the top of the Cimatario.
Four companies and Rodrigo’s band remained. These Driscoll spread out in a skirmish line that made a long beaded chain around their side of the hill. It was evidently an unfamiliar method, for the Imperialist tiradores fired down on them contemptuously. But each time, while the enemy above were reloading, the Grays and outlaws below were climbing a few yards, each man of them individually, up from behind his own particular rock. The Imperialists, it now appeared, had blundered incomprehensibly, since they had actually taken away nearly all the cannon captured on the Cimatario. But six-pound affairs from batteries in the Alameda soon began to splinter and furrow around the climbing men. One loosened boulder rolled and struck Doc Clayburn on the tip of the shoulder, bringing him down like a bag of meal. He arose, feeling himself. “Now, by the Great and Unterrified Continental––” he began, as he always did at the monotony of being hit. Then his disgust changed to wonder. “W’y,” he cried, “I’m not either, I only thought I was!”