xican from his fair skin, who stood confidently beside his piece,
an ancient machine, made of copper and strengthened by bands of iron.
A handsome face; dead to morality, alive to pleasure; the face of a
man past thirty, the expression of immortal one-and-twenty! A figure
from the pages of Ovid, metamorphosed to a gunner of Santa Anna! The
bright radiance from a cloudless sky, the smoke having drifted
westward from the summit, fell upon him and his gun.

With inscrutable calmness, one hand fondling the breech, he regarded
the fleeting figures and the hoarse-throated pursuers; then, as if to
time the opportunity to the moment, he bent over the gun.

"I wonder if this first-born can still bark!" he muttered.

But an instant's hesitation, friend and foe being fairly intermingled,
was fatal to his purpose; the venerable culverin remained silent, and
the gunner met hand-to-hand a figure that sprang from the incoming
host. Simultaneously the rapid firing of a new wave of besiegers from
the other side of the castle threw once more a pall of smoke over the
scene, and, beneath its mantle, the two men were like figures
struggling in a fog, feeling rather than seeing each other's blade,
divining by touch the cut, pass or aggressive thrust.

"Faugh!" laughed the gunner. "They'll kill us with smoke."

The discharge of small arms gradually ceased; the fresh breeze again
cleared the crest of the mount, showing the white walls of the
structure which had been so obstinately defended; the valley, where
the batteries now lay silent, having spoken their thundering prologue,
and the alien flag, the regimental colors of the invaders, floating
from the upper walls. Below on the road toward the city, a band of
white across the table land, successive spots of smoke momentarily
appeared and were succeeded, after a considerable interval, by the
rub-a-dub of rifles. From the disenchanting distance the charge of a
body of men, in the attempt to dislodge a party entrenched in a ditch,
lost the tragic aspect of warfare, and the soldiers who fell seemed no
larger than the toy figures of a nursery game.

With the brightening of the summit to the light of day, eagerly the
two combatants near the copper gun gazed for the first time into each
other's eyes, and, at that trenchant glance, a tremor crossed the
features of the gunner, and his arm, with its muscles of steel,
suddenly became inert, powerless.

"_Mon Dieu!_--'Tis Ernest--little Ernest!" h