"You are warned, you and your men."
"I will not surrender."
Twenty bullets whistled from the top of the wall, but Nocobotha had returned to his warriors with the rapidity of an arrow.
"Back! Back!" he shouted to them.
A detonation, loud as a hundred peals of thunder, rent the air. The major had blown up the powder in the fortress. The stony giant oscillated for two or three seconds on its base like an intoxicated mastodon; then, suddenly torn from the ground, it rose in the air, and burst like an overripe pomegranate, amid expiring cries of "Long live our country!"
A shower of stones and horridly mutilated corpses fell on the terrified Indians.
All was over. Nocobotha was master of the ruins of Carmen. Weeping with rage on seeing this disastrous victory, he planted his totem on a piece of tottering wall, which was the only relic of the fort and its defenders.