Luckily we didn't meet anything, but I saw that, just ahead, the road narrowed, and that we couldn't possibly get through there side by side.
'Let them go ahead,' I shouted, and leant over to help the driver pull in the team, but then one of the Hercules mids. sang out, 'Who upset the coal lighter?' the others shouted, 'The rotten Hectors!'—and that made me as mad as a hatter. I didn't care whether we all went to glory or not so long as we beat them—after that.
'Pull up, you fools!' Mr. Macdonald shouted, but the mules were quite out of hand.
We came to the narrow part, the leading mules bumped into each other, then the others, till the wheelers were touching; our axles bumped once or twice, there was a lurch and a crash, the other carriage toppled over on to the bank, the wheeler mules were on their backs, and the mids. shot out head over heels as we flew past, the Angel and Bob cheering wildly.
Before we were out of sight we saw the four mids. and the driver on their feet again, trying to right the carriage, so I knew they weren't hurt.
Mr. Macdonald simply wagged his head from side to side. 'It was my weight brought us through—you'd have upset but for me.'
I do actually believe he enjoyed it.
We were in the city itself by now, and the mules had steadied down on the rough stone streets crowded with people on foot or riding horses or mules. There were soldiers at every corner—quite smart chaps these—and they all had the vertical green and yellow stripes in their helmets or hats. The same colours, hoisted with the stripes vertical, hung at half-mast from nearly every house, and the few women, we saw, had the same colours too.
'There are some of de Costa's people,' Mr. Macdonald sung out, as we passed a group of sunburnt men outside a café. I looked, and saw that they had patches of green and black stripes worn horizontally.
'They call the two parties the Verticals and Horizontals,' Mr. Macdonald told me. 'Those are countrymen; you can see that by their rig.'