The stones, vigorously assailed by the repeated blows of the guerilleros, were beginning to fall outwards. The breach was rapidly entered, but at last a whole piece of wall fell in one mass into the garden. The guerilleros uttered a loud shout, threw down their picks, and seizing their weapons, prepared to rush forth. But suddenly a terrible explosion was heard; the earth quivered as if agitated by a volcanic convulsion; a cloud of smoke rose to the sky, and masses of ruins, raised by the explosion, were hurled in all directions. A horrible cry of agony rang through the air, and that was all: a deadly silence brooded over the scene.
"Forward! Forward!" Dominique shouted.
The injury caused by the mine was terrible. The entrance of the passage, completely destroyed, and filled up with masses of earth and heaped-up stones, had not permitted one of the assailants to pass. Here and there the disfigured remains of what had been a moment before men, emerged from the middle of the fragments. The catastrophe must have been awful, but the passage kept the secret close.
"Oh! Heaven be praised! We are saved!" don Andrés exclaimed.
"Yes, yes," the majordomo said; "if no other assailants arrive from another quarter."
Suddenly, as if in justification of the remark, loud cries were heard blended with shots, and a vivid flame, which rose from the outhouses of the hacienda, lit up the country with a sinister gleam.
"To arms! To arms!" the peons shouted, as they ran up in alarm. "The guerilleros! The guerilleros!"
And they speedily saw, by the red glow of the fire which was devouring the buildings, the black outlines of some hundred men, who hurried up, brandishing their weapons, and uttering yells of fury. A few paces in advance of the bandits advanced a man, holding a sabre in one hand, and a torch in the other.
"Don Melchior!" the old gentleman exclaimed, despairingly.
"By heaven! I will stop him!" Dominique said, taking aim at him.