But the boy's nerves were yet keyed too highly for relaxation. His weary body was resting, but his heart still throbbed. He saw the sentinels walking back and forth. He saw the dark shapes of cannon posted on the promontories, and above them the mountains darker and yet more somber. Several fires still burned in the ravines, and the officers sat about them talking, but most of the army slept. As Phil lay on the earth he heard the wind moaning behind him as it swept up the pass, but it still touched his face with the fine impalpable dust that stung like hot sand, and that seemed to him to be an omen and a presage. He lay a long time staring into the blackness in the direction in which Santa Anna's army now lay, where he and his comrades had fought such a good fight at midnight. He saw nothing there with his real eye, but with his mind's eye he beheld the vast preparations, the advance of the horsemen, and the flashing of thousands of lances in the brilliant light.
When the morning sun was showing over the ridges and peaks of the Sierra Madre, and pouring its light into the nooks and crannies of the ravines, he fell asleep.
CHAPTER XIV
BUENA VISTA
Phil did not sleep long, only an hour perhaps, and then it was Breakstone's arm on his shoulder that awakened him. He had laid down fully clothed, and he sprang at once to his feet. His nerves, too, had been so thoroughly keyed for action that every faculty responded at once to the call, and he was never more wide awake in his life. Quickly he looked about him and saw that it was a most brilliant morning. The sun was swinging upward with a splendor that he had not before seen in these gorges of the Sierra Madre. The mountains were bathed in light. The bare ridges and peaks stood out like carving, and the sunbeams danced along the black lava.
"It is Washington's Birthday, and the sun is doing him honor," said Breakstone. "But look there, Phil."
He pointed a long straight finger into the south.
"See that tiny cloud of dust," he said, "there where rock and sky meet. I'll wager everything against nothing that it was raised by the hoofs of Minon's cavalry. Santa Anna and his whole army are surely advancing. Watch it grow."
Phil looked with eager eyes, and he saw everything that Bill Breakstone had predicted come to pass. The cloud of dust, so small at first that he could scarcely see it, grew in height, and began to spread in a yellow line along the whole horizon. By and by it grew so high that the wind lifted the upper part of it and sent it whirling off in spirals and coils. Then through the dust they saw flashes, the steel of weapons giving back the rays of the sun like a mirror.
The American scouts and sentinels had been drawn in--no need for them now--and the whole army was crouched at the mouth of the pass. Almost every soldier could watch Santa Anna unroll before them the vast and glittering panorama of his army. But Taylor himself did not see this first appearance. He had not come from Saltillo, and Wool, the second in command, waited, troubled and uneasy.