“Follow me, lads, give them cold steel. Don’t shoot. You may hit friends! Charge!”
Tom Maxon’s voice was far from jolly now. There was death in every note of it as, at the head of a body of United States Blue-jackets, he dashed in among the black barbarians. When he caught sight of the prostrate, bleeding form of his old school-fellow he raged like a wounded lion among Sybella’s savage followers.
As the lieutenant saw that the range of fire was free from his friends, he cried out, hoarse with passion,
“Fire at will. Give them hell!” and he emptied his own revolver into the huddled crowd of mountaineers, who still stood, brave to recklessness, hesitating about what to do against the new adversaries.
The repeating rifles of the Americans soon covered the roadway with dark corpses. Long lanes were cut by the rapid fire through the black mass. With howls and yells of mingled terror, rage and disappointment the mob broke and taking to the jungle disappeared in the darkness of the adjacent forest.
A sailor kicked aside what he thought was a bundle of rags, and started back as the torch that he bore revealed the open, fangless mouth and snake-like, glaring eyes of an old crone of a woman who in death seemed even more horrible than in life.
A rifle ball, at close range, had shattered Mother Sybella’s skull.