But at this very moment a deafening roar was heard in the direction of the _tête de pont_. Round-shot and grape, rifle-balls and canister came crashing down the causeway into the Mexican ranks from their own battery. Worth was there just in time. Down the road and over the ditch, through the field and hedge and swamp, in tumult and panic, the Mexicans fled from the bayonets of the Sixth and Garland’s brigade. A shout, louder than the cannon’s peal--Worth was on their heels, with his best men. Before Shields reached the causeway he was by his side, driving the Mexican horse into their infantry, and Ayres was galloping up with a captured Mexican gun. Captain Kearny, with a few dragoons, rode straight into the flying host, scattered them right and left, sabred all he could reach, and halted before the gate of Mexico. Not till then did he perceive that he was alone with his little party, nearly all of whom were wounded; but, in spite of the hundreds of escopetas that were levelled at him, he galloped back in safety to headquarters. The sun, which rose that morning on a proud army and a defiant metropolis, set at even on a shattered, haggard band and a city full of woe-stricken wretches who did nothing all night but quake with terror and cry at every noise, “Aqui viene los Yanquies!” All along the causeway, and in the fields and swamp on either side, heaps of dead men and cattle, intermingled with broken ammunition-carts, marked where the American shot had told. A gory track leading to the _tête de pont_, groups of dead in the fields on the west of Churubusco, over whose pale faces some stalks of tattered corn still waved, red blotches in the marsh next the causeway, where the rich blood of Carolina and New York soaked the earth, showed where the fire of the heavy Mexican guns and the countless escopetas of the infantry had been most murderous. Scott had lost, in that day’s work, over one thousand men in killed and wounded, seventy-nine of whom were officers. The Mexican loss, according to Santa Anna, was one-third of his army, equal probably to ten thousand men, one-fourth of whom were prisoners, the rest killed and wounded. As the sun went down the troops were recalled to headquarters; but all night long the battle-field swarmed with straggling parties, seeking some lost comrade in the cold and rain, and surgeons hurrying from place to place and offering succor to the wounded.