THOSE two flags, one the red flag of England, flying at Pensacola,
haunt the General night and day. His hunting-shirt men, twenty-eight
hundred from his beloved Tennessee and twelve hundred from the
territories of Mississippi and Alabama, are lusting for battle. He
resolves to lead them into Florida, across the Spanish line.
“We must rout the English out of Pensacola!” he explains to Colonel
Coffee.
“Pensacola!” repeats Colonel Coffee, looking thoughtful. “It is Spanish
territory, General! There is the boundary; and diplomacy, I believe,
although it is an art whereof I know little, lays stress on the word
boundary.”
“Boundary!” snorts the General in dudgeon. “The English are there! Where
my foe goes, I go; my diplomacy is of the sword.”
The General elaborates; for he is not without liking the sound of his
own voice. Governor Maurequez, he says, has welcomed the English; he
must enlarge that welcome to include Americans.
“For I tell you,” goes on the General, “that I shall expect from him
the same courtesy he extends to Colonel Nichols. Nor do I despair of
receiving it, since I shall take my artillery. With both Americans and
English among his guests, if trouble fall out it will be his own
fault, and should teach him to practice hereafter a less complicated
hospitality.”
The General prepares for the journey to Pensacola. The treasure chest
shows the usual emptiness, and he exerts his own credit, as he did on
a Natchez occasion, to provide for his hunting-shirt men. This time the
Government will honor his drafts promptly, for election day is drawing
near.
One sun-filled autumn morning, the General and his hunting-shirt men
march away for Pensacola, their hearts full of cheering anticipations of
a fight, and eight days provant in the commissariat.
“We should be there in eight days,” says the General hopefully, “and
Governor Maurequez and the English must provide for us after that.”
The General does not overstate the powers of his hunting-shirt men, and
the eighth morning finds them and him within striking distance of Fort
St. Michael. The General shades his blue eyes with his hand and scans
the walls with vicious lynxlike intentness in search of that hated red
flag. His heart chills when he does not find it. There is the flag of
Arragon and Castile; but the staff which only yesterday supported the
flag of England stands an unfurnished, naked spar of pine.
The General heaves a sigh.
“Coffee,” he says, pathos in his tones, “they have run away.”
“Possibly,” returns the excellent Coffee, who sees that the General's
regrets are leveled at an absence of English, and is anxious to console
him, “possibly they've only retired to Fort Barrancas, six miles below,
and are waiting for us there.”
The disappointed General shakes his head; he does not share the
confidence of the optimistic Coffee.
“Send Major Piere,” he says, “with a flag of truce to announce to the
Spaniard our purpose of lunching with him. We will ask him, now we're
here, by what license he gives shelter to our enemies.”
Major Piere goes forward, white flag fluttering, and is promptly fired
upon by Governor Maurequez at the distance of six hundred yards. The
balls fly wide and high, for the Spaniard shoots like a Creek. Finding
himself a target, the disgusted Major Piere returns and reports his
uncivil reception. The General's eyes blaze with a kind of blue fury.
“Turn out the troops!” he roars.
The drums sound the long roll. The hunting-shirt men are about the
cookery--being always hungry--of the last of those eight days' rations.
When they fall into line, the General makes them a speech. It is brief,
but registers the point of better provender in Pensacola than that which
now bubbles in their coffee pots and burns on their spits. Whereat the
hunting-shirt men cheer joyously.
“The English, too, are there,” concludes the General. Then, in a
burst of flattering eloquence: “And I know that you would sooner fight
Englishmen than eat.”
At the name of Englishmen, the hunting-shirt men give such a cheer that
it quite throws that former cheer into the vocal shade. Everyone is in
immediate favor of rushing on Pensacola.
The General becomes cunning, and sends Colonel Coffee with a detachment
of cavalry to threaten Fort St. Michael from the east. The Spaniards are
singularly guileless in matters military. That feigned attack succeeds
beyond expression, and the befogged Governor Maurequez hurries his
entire garrison to those menaced eastern walls.
While the excited Spaniards are making a chattering, magpie fringe along
the eastern ramparts, the General moves the bulk of his hunting-shirt
forces, under cover of the woods, to the fort's western face. Once they
are placed, he gives the order:
“Charge!”
The word sends the hunting-shirt men at that mud-built citadel with a
whoop.
The Spaniards are unstrung by surprise, and fall to pattering prayers
and telling beads. In the very midst of their orisons, the hunting-shirt
men, as in the fight at the Horseshoe, pour like a cataract over the
parapet and sweep the praying, helpless Spaniards into a corner.
The work, however, is not altogether done. When Governor Maurequez gives
the order to man the eastern walls against the deploying Coffee, he does
not remain to see it executed.
Having sublime faith in the heroism of his followers, for him to
personally remain, he argues, would be superfluous. Nay, it might even
be construed into a criticism of his devoted soldiery, as implying a
fear that they will not fight if relieved of his fiery presence, not to
say the fiery pressure of his commanding eye. Having thus defined his
position, the valorous Governor Maurequez, acting in that spirit of
compliment toward his people which has ever characterized his speech,
gathers up his gubernatorial skirts and scuttles for his palace like a
scared hen pheasant.
Having swept the walls of St. Michael clean of magpie Spaniards, and run
up the stars and stripes on the vacant English staff, the General and
his hunting-shirt men make ready to follow Governor Maurequez to the
palace. He is to be their host; it is their polite duty to find him with
all dispatch and offer their compliments.
Full of this urbane purpose, they wheel their bristling ranks on the
town. Approaching double-quick, they casually lick up, as with a tongue
of flame, a brace of abortive blockhouses which obstruct their path. At
this, an interior fort opens fire with grapeshot and shrapnel, and the
hunting-shirt men spring upon it with the ruthless ferocity of panthers.
To quench it is no more than the fighting work of a moment. The General,
with his flag already on the ramparts of Fort St. Michael, now feels his
clutch at the very throat of Pensacola.
Governor Maurequez, equipped in his turn of a milk-white flag, bursts
from the palace portals.
“Oh, Senores Americanos,” he cries, “spare, for the love of the Virgin,
my beautiful Pensacola! As you hope for heaven's mercy, spare my
beautiful city!”
The wild hunting-shirt men are in a jocular mood. The terrified rushing
about of Governor Maurequez excites their laughter.
“Where is your humane General Jackson?” wails Governor Maurequez, in
appeal to the hunting-shirt men. “Where is he--I beseech you? I hear he
is the soul of merciful forbearance!”
At this the hunting-shirt laughter breaks out with double volume, as
though Governor Maurequez has evolved a jest.
The alarmed Governor, catching sight of a couple of dead Spaniards,
fresh killed in the struggle with the foolish interior fort, expresses
his grief in staccato shrieks, which serve as weird marks of punctuation
to the laughter of the rude hunting-shirt men. The laughter ceases when
the General himself rides up.
“Thar's the Gin'ral,” says a hunting-shirt man, biting his merriment
short off. “Thar's the man of mercy you're asking for.”
Governor Maurequez starts back at sight of the gaunt face, emaciated by
sickness born of those Benton bullets, and yellowed to primrose hue
with the malaria of the Alabama swamps. The lean figure on the big war
stallion might remind him of Don Quixote--for he has read and remembers
his Cervantes--save for the frown like the look of a fighting falcon,
and the fire-sparkle in the dangerous blue eyes. As it is, he feels that
his visitor is a perilous man, and begins to bow and cringe.
“I beg the victorious Senor General,” says he, pressing meanwhile a
right hand to his heart, and presenting the white square of truce with
the other--“I beg the victorious Senor General to spare my beautiful
Pensacola!”
“You are Governor Maurequez!” returns the General, hard as flint.
“Yes, Senor General; I am Governor Maurequez, as you say. Also”--here
his voice begins to shake--“I must remind your excellency that this is a
province of Spain, and ask by what right you invade it.”
“Right!” returns the General, anger rising. “Did you not fire on my
messenger? Sir, if you were Satan and this your kingdom, it would be the
same! I would storm the walls of hell itself to get at an Englishman.”
There comes the whiplike crack of a rifle almost at the General's elbow.
Far up the narrow street, full four hundred yards and more, a flying
Spanish soldier throws up his hands with a death yell, and pitches
forward on his face. At this, the hunting-shirt man who fired tosses his
coonskin cap in the air and shouts:
“Thar, Bill Potter, the jug of whisky's mine! Thar's your Spaniard too
dead to skin! If the distance ain't four hundred yard, you kin have the
gun!”
“What's this?” cries the General fiercely. “Nothin', Gin'ral!” replies
the hunting-shirt man, abashed at the forbidding manner of the General,
“nothin', only Bill Potter, from the 'Possum Trot, bets me a jug of
whisky that old Soapstick here”--holding up his rifle as identifying
“old Soapstick”--“won't kill at four hundred yard.”
“Betting, eh!” retorts the General, assuming the coldly implacable. “Now
it's in my mind, Mr. Soapstick, that unless you mend your morals, some
one about your size will pass an hour strung up by the thumbs so high
his moccasins won't touch the grass! How often must I tell you that I'm
bound to break up gambling among my troops?”
The rebuked soapstick one slinks away, and the General turns to Colonel
Coffee.
“Give the word, Coffee, to cease firing.”
The General's glance comes around to Governor Maurequez, still bowing
and presenting his white flag.
“Where are those English?” he demands.
The frightened Governor Maurequez makes the sign of the cross. He is
sorry, but the pig English withdrew to Fort Barrancas at the first signs
of the coming of the victorious Senor General, taking with them their
hateful red flag. Also, it was they who fired on the messenger. If the
victorious Senor General will but move quickly, he may catch the pig
English before they escape.
The General, half his hunting-shirt men at his back, starts for Fort
Barrancas. They are two miles on their way when the earth is shaken by a
thunderous explosion. Over the tops of the forest pines a gush of black
smoke shoots upward toward the sky.
“They have blown up the fort!” says the explanatory Coffee.
The General says nothing, but urges speed. At last they come in sight of
what has been Fort Barrancas. It is as the astute Coffee surmised. The
one-eyed Colonel Nichols and his English have fled, leaving a slow-match
and the magazine to destroy what they dared not defend. Far away in the
offing Captain Percy's English fleet--upon which the one-eyed Colonel
Nichols and his fugitive followers have taken refuge--wind aft and an
ebb tide to help, is speeding seaward like gulls.