“W’y, what’s the matter?” asked Driscoll.
“You are trifling, man. That thing has no trigger.”
Much as an artisan would explain the peculiarities of a favorite tool, Driscoll said, “Now look here, you strip it–this way–so.”
And as he explained, he illustrated. He raised the hammer under his thumb, he released it on the cartridge, and Fra Diavolo’s sombrero flew off.
Fra Diavolo threw up his hand involuntarily, and there was a second report. Fra Diavolo’s pistol twisted out of his grasp. The brace of navies had not gone higher than the American’s waist.
“So,” Driscoll concluded.
At the same moment one of the sailors, a bullet-headed lad of Normandy, was observed to do a very peculiar thing. Jumping in front of Fra Diavolo he drew up one knee, for all the world like a dancer who meant then and there to cut a pigeon’s wing. His foot described a circle under the knee, then the performer turned partly round, and as a lightning bolt his leg straightened out full against Fra Diavolo’s stomach. The ranchero dropped like a bag of sand, except that he groaned. Ney captured the fallen pistol. A musket blazed, and a sailor cursed. And forthwith the maelstrom began. It went swirling 47round, with weird contortions and murderous eddies, but always its seething vortex was the lone trooper.
Luckily, firearms were out of the question where both sides were so mixed together. But Mexicans and sailors plied their knives instead, so that there was much soppy red spreading over the yellowish white of shirts, and over the blue of jackets. The pigeon-wing diversion, called the savate, also played its bizarre rôle, for wherever a Frenchman found space for the straightening out of a leg, in that instant a little native shot from him as a cat from the toe of a boot. Fra Diavolo was deposited flat on his back each time he tried to rise, till the sole of a foot took on more terror than a cannon’s mouth. As for Michel Ney, he was beautiful and gallant, now that what he had to do came without thinking. He achieved things splendidly with the butt of his enemy’s revolver, and exhorted his men the while to the old, brilliant daring of Frenchmen.
The Storm Centre, though, was merely workmanlike. He put away the six-shooters, and strove barehanded with joy and vigor, which was delightful; yet so systematic, that it was anything rather than romance. It might have been geometry, in that a foe is safer horizontal than perpendicular, and the theorem he applied industriously, with simple faith and earnest fists.
Yet, all told, it was a highly successful affair. Din Driscoll objected to the brevity, but that could hardly be altered for his sake. The little demons of Mexicans crawled from the outskirts of the mess, here one, there two or three, and now many, limping and nursing heads, and rubbing themselves dubiously, with hideous grimaces.