'Not a bad fling, my man,' he said lightly. 'But 'twas the act of a coward!'
Then he drew his sword—was forced to do it, because the crowd were pressing him close, some with sticks, others with fists. The square-shouldered man of awhile ago—he with the bandy legs—had a butcher's knife in his hand.
'Murder!' shrieked the women, as soon as Gilles' sword darted out of its sheath like a tongue of living flame.
'Aye, murder!' he riposted. 'I can see it in your eyes! So stand back, all of you, or the foremost among you who dares to advance is a dead man.'
They did not advance. With a churl's natural terror of the sword, they retreated, realizing for the first time that it was a noble lord, an exalted personage whom, in their blindness, they had dared to attack. Spaniard or no, he was a gentleman; and suddenly the thought of floggings or worse for such an outrage dissipated the fumes of folly, which some unknown person's rhetoric had raised inside their brains.
De Landas' agents in the rear saw this perceptible retreat. Another moment or two, and their carefully laid schemes would certainly come to naught. Failure for them now was unthinkable. The eyes of their employer were undoubtedly upon them, even though they could not see him, and they knew from past bitter experience how relentless the young Spanish lord could be if his will was thwarted through the incompetence of his servants. One of them—I think his name was Jan—bolder than the others, called to his comrades and to those on the fringe of the crowd who had not been scared by the sight of that fine Toledo blade, gave them the lead, which they promptly followed, of picking up more stones out of the gutter and flinging them at the stranger one after another in rapid succession. Some of this stone-throwing was very wild, and Gilles was able to dodge most of the missiles, whilst others actually hit some of the crowd. A woman received one on the shoulder; the bandy-legged bully another on the head. Blood now was flowing freely, and the sight of blood acts on a turbulent crowd in the same way as it does on a goaded bull. No longer frightened of the sword, the riotous crew began to attack the stranger more savagely. One man struck at him with a stick, another tried to edge nearer in order to use a knife.
Stones were being flung now from every point, and soon it became impossible to dodge them all. The crowd had become a screeching mob, bent on outrage and on murder. The screams of women, the cries of little children, mingled with hoarse cries of rage and volleys of unspeakable insults. The sight of blood had of a truth turned a knot of malcontents into a pack of brute beasts, fuming with an insatiable desire to kill.
As fast as the stones fell around him, Gilles picked them up and flung them back. These seldom missed their mark, and already several of his assailants had been forced to retreat from the field. But now a piece of granite hit him on the sword-arm and he had barely the time to transfer his sword to his left hand in order to ward off a thrust aimed at him with a knife, just below the belt. His right arm hung limp by his side, aching furiously; a small piece of sharp stone had grazed his forehead, and with an unconsidered gesture, he tore the mask from his face, for the blood was streaming beneath it into his eyes. But that movement—wellnigh instantaneous as it was—placed him at a greater disadvantage still, for another stone, more accurately aimed than some others, hit his left arm so violently that, but for an instinctive, nervy clutch on the hilt, his sword would have fallen from his grasp.
After that, he remembered nothing more. A red veil appeared to interpose itself between his eyes and that mass of vehement, raging, perspiring humanity before him. Each individual before him seemed to the weary fighter to assume greater and ever greater proportions, until he felt himself confronted with a throng of giants with distorted faces and huge, ugly jaws, through which a hot fire came, searing his face and obscuring his vision. Instinctively he still dodged the missiles, still parried with his sword; but his movements were mechanical; he felt that they were becoming inefficient ... that he himself was exhausted ... vanquished. Vaguely he marvelled at Destiny's strange caprice, which had decreed that he should die, assassinated by a set of shrieking men and women, whom he had never wronged even by a thought.
Then suddenly the whole wall behind him appeared to give way, and he sank backwards into oblivion.