"Nearer seven thousand in the field. And Santa Anna has twenty-five thousand still, I'll bet a cooky."
"We've licked that number before. Odds don't make any difference to Scott men."
"Not much they don't," Hannibal agreed. "One more of these little 'brushes' and we'll be in the Halls of Montezuma."
All the able-bodied troops were paraded at nine o'clock the next morning, September 9, to witness burial. A long trench had been dug just outside the village of Tacubaya. The wagons, covered with United States flags and bearing the bodies of the killed in the battle of the eighth, were escorted by funeral squads from each of the regiments. The fifes and drums and a band, playing the funeral march, accompanied; the troops followed with muskets at a support. The tattered battle flags had been draped with crape. The cannon fired minute guns in solemn fashion.
General Scott and staff, and all the general and field officers, stood with heads bared; the troops, in a half square, presented arms, while the Episcopal church burial service was read by Chaplain "Holy Joe" Morrison. Then the sappers and miners filled in the trench.
It was a bright day. The high parapets of Chapultepec, to the north, were thronged with Mexican soldiers looking down upon the ceremony.
"B' gorry, you'd better be attindin' your own funerals," old Sergeant Mulligan growled at them, when the parade had been dismissed.
Following the battle of Molino del Rey, General Scott seemed to be in no hurry to take Chapultepec.
