os!_" continued Jago, "Hidalgo
had now more than fifty thousand men at his back; but what were they?
Three thousand infantry and four hundred cavalry among a legion of
Indians. The soldiers were lost amid the brown multitude, like flies in a
pail of pulque. The fifty thousand Indians were shoeless and half-naked,
armed with clubs and slings, or at most with machetes, which might do
well enough to cut up _tasajo_,[38] but were a deal too short to be
measured with Spanish bayonets. Capital fellows were they for plundering
and murdering, but ill fitted for a fight. In Miguel el Grande, in San
Felipe, in Zelaya, the Gachupins had been cut off to a man. That would not
have mattered much, but the _gente irracionale_ had included the Creoles
with the Spaniards. In Guanaxato, it was still worse. I joined Hidalgo
just in time for that dance. We were received with open arms by the
Leperos and Indians, but the Creoles and Gachupins had shut themselves up
in the Alhondega. This was the first resistance our mad mob had met with,
and they rushed like raging savages to attack the granary. They were right
well received, and a desperate fight began. At last a giant of a
_tenatero_ found an enormous flat stone, put it on his head as he might
have done his sombrero, and held it on with his right hand, while with a
lighted torch in his left, he set fire to the door of the Alhondega. A way
was soon opened to the assailants, who rushed in over the smouldering
fragments of the door. In a few minutes fourteen hundred Spaniards and
Creoles, with wives and children, were stabbed, struck down, and torn in
pieces. The Indians waded in blood and treasure. The latter they brought
out by baskets full; and the fools might be seen changing doubloons for
copper money, taking them for half-dollar bits.

"About four thousand Indians had joined us out of the city, and thirty
thousand out of the district, of Guanaxato. Hidalgo was at the summit of
his glory. A council of war had named him generalissimo; Allende was his
second in command; Ballesa, Ximenes, and Aldama, lieutenant-generals;
Abasala, Ocon, and the brothers Martinez were brigadiers. Hidalgo sang a
_Te Deum_, and divided the army into regiments, each of a thousand men,
and gave regular pay; to the officers three dollars a-day, the cavalry one
dollar, and the rest half a dollar. He himself appeared in field-marshal's
uniform, blue with white facings, the medal of the Virgin of Guadalupe
upon his br