A quarter of an hour elapsed, during which we lost ourselves in conjectures as to who this acquaintance of Ready's could be. At the end of that time the captain and his new (or old) friend re-appeared. The latter walked away, and we saw him enter the government house, while Ready joined us, as silent and phlegmatic as ever, and resumed his stick and penknife. In reply to our enquiries as to who the officer was, he only said that he belonged to the army besieging Callao, and that he had once made a voyage as his passenger. This was all the information we could extract from our taciturn friend; but we saw plainly that the officer was somebody of importance, from the respect paid him by the soldiers and others whom he met.
The morning following this incident we were sitting over our chocolate, when an orderly dragoon came to ask for Captain Ready. The captain went out to speak to him, and presently returning, went on with his breakfast very deliberately.
When he had done, he asked me if I were inclined for a little excursion out of the town, which would, perhaps, keep us a couple of days away. I willingly accepted, heartily sick as I was of the monotonous life we were leading. We packed up our valises, took our pistols and cutlasses, and went out.
To my astonishment the orderly was waiting at the door with two magnificent Spanish chargers, splendidly accoutred. They were the finest horses I had seen in Peru, and my curiosity was strongly excited to know who had sent them, and whither we were going. To my questions, Ready replied that we were going to visit the officer whom he had spoken to on the preceding day, and who was with the besieging army, and had once been his passenger, but he declared he did not know his name or rank.
We had left the town about a mile behind us, when we heard the sound of cannon in the direction we were approaching; it increased as we went on, and about a mile further we met a string of carts, full of wounded, going in to Lima. Here and there we caught sight of parties of marauders, who disappeared as soon as they saw our orderly. I felt a great longing and curiosity to witness the fight that was evidently going on—not, however, that I was particularly desirous of taking share in it, or putting myself in the way of the bullets. My friend the captain jogged on by my side, taking little heed of the roar of the cannon, which to him was no novelty; for having passed his life at sea, he had had more than one encounter with pirates and other rough customers, and been many times under the fire of batteries, running in and out of blockaded American ports. His whole attention was now engrossed by the management of his horse, which was somewhat restive, and he, like most sailors, was a very indifferent rider.
On reaching the top of a small rising ground, we beheld to the left the dark frowning bastions of the fort, and to the right the village of Bella Vista, which, although commanded by the guns of Callao, had been chosen as the headquarters of the besieging army—the houses being, for the most part, built of huge blocks of stone, and offering sufficient resistance to the balls. The orderly pointed out to us the various batteries, and especially one which was just completed, and was situated about three hundred yards from the fortress. It had not yet been used, and was still masked from the enemy by some houses which stood just in its front.
While we were looking about us, Ready's horse, irritated by the noise of the firing, the flashes of the guns, and perhaps more than any thing by the captain's bad riding, became more and more unmanageable, and at last taking the bit between his teeth started off at a mad gallop, closely followed by myself and the orderly, to whose horses the panic seemed to have communicated itself. The clouds of dust raised by the animals' feet, prevented us from seeing whither we were going. Suddenly there was an explosion that seemed to shake the very earth under us, and Ready, the orderly, and myself, lay sprawling with our horses on the ground. Before we could collect our senses and get up, we were nearly deafened by a tremendous roar of artillery close to us, and at the same moment a shower of stones and fragments of brick and mortar clattered about our ears.
The orderly was stunned by his fall; I was bruised and bewildered. Ready was the only one who seemed in no ways put out, and with his usual phlegm, extricating himself from under his horse, he came to our assistance. I was soon on my legs, and endeavouring to discover the cause of all this uproar.
Our unruly steeds had brought us close to the new battery, at the very moment that the train of a mine under the houses in front of it had been fired. The instant the obstacle was removed, the artillerymen had opened a tremendous fire on the fort. The Spaniards were not slow to return the compliment, and fortunate it was that a solid fragment of wall intervened between us and their fire, or all our troubles about the brig, and every thing else, would have been at an end. Already upwards of twenty balls had struck the old broken wall. Shot and shell were flying in every direction, the smoke was stifling, the uproar indescribable. It was so dark with the smoke and dust from the fallen houses, that we could not see an arm's length before us. The captain asked two or three soldiers who were hurrying by, where the battery was; but they were in too great haste to answer, and it was only when the smoke cleared away a little, that we discovered we were not twenty paces from it. Ready seized my arm, and pulling me with him, I the next moment found myself standing beside a gun, under cover of the breastworks.
The battery consisted of thirty, twenty-four, and thirty-six pounders, served with a zeal and courage which far exceeded any thing I had expected to find in the patriot army. The fellows were really more than brave, they were foolhardy. They danced rather than walked round the guns, and exhibited a contempt of death that could not well be surpassed. As to drawing the guns back from the embrasures while they loaded them, they never dreamed of such a thing. They stood jeering and scoffing the Spaniards, and bidding them take better aim.