Page:Into Mexico with General Scott (1920).djvu/298

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himself growling about it with the others. Hannibal had not got in on the attack either—but Hannibal had been with the storming column of September 8, when the mill and Casa-Mata had yielded, and he ought to be willing to give place to somebody else. Captain Gore, and Lieutenant Smith, and Lieutenant Grant had missed out also. The Fourth Regiment had supplied Lieutenants Rogers and Maloney; and Company B had supplied Sergeant Mulligan, the "top" sergeant of the whole division.

Jerry cogitated. The column had been made up—was under orders to report to General Pillow before the engagement in the morning. There seemed no hope for the rest of them.

The night was rather noisy, with considerable skirmishing by outposts, and a constant movement upon the hill, as though the enemy was getting ready, too, for the morrow.

In the pink of the morning the bombardment by the heavy batteries reopened. General Twiggs' guns, on the roads from the south to the city gates, likewise went into action. The Mexicans were trying to reinforce Chapultepec again, and they had occupied a long trench behind the wall at the foot of the cypress grove just east of the mill.

The two heavy batteries here, one in the mill and one south of it, were firing away upon Chapultepec, but General Pillow made other preparations. He stationed two pieces from Magruder's First Artillery battery, under Second Lieutenant Thomas J. Jackson, to watch the same cavalry column that had threatened in the northwest at the battle of Sep-