His men followed him with yells of fury. The collision was terrible, the fight fearful; for four or five minutes a funereal silence brooded over this confused mass of combatants, who attacked each so savagely. They stabbed each other mercilessly, disdaining to use their firearms, and preferring, as a speedier resource, the sharp points of their sabres and bayonets.
At length the President's troops fell back slightly, the insurgents took advantage of it to redouble their efforts, which were already superhuman, and reached the general's house. The doors were broken open in an instant, and all rushed pell-mell into the courtyard. They were saved! since they had at last reached the shelter where they hoped to defend themselves.
At this moment a frightful thing happened; the gallery commanding the courtyard and the stairs was entirely occupied by soldiers, and so soon as the insurgents appeared, the muskets were pointed down at them, a tornado of fire passed over them like the blast of death, and in a second a mass of corpses covered the ground.
The insurgents, terrified by this sudden attack, which they were so far from anticipating, hurriedly fell back, instinctively seeking an outlet by which to escape. The tumult then became terrible, and the massacre assumed the proportions of an organized butchery. Driven back into the courtyard by the troops who pursued them, and met there by those who had attacked them and now charged at the bayonet point, these wretched men, rendered senseless by terror, did not dream any longer of employing their weapons, but falling on their knees before their executioners, and clasping their trembling hands, they implored the mercy of the troops, who, intoxicated by the smell of blood, and affected by that horrible murder fever which seizes upon even the coolest man on the battle field, felled them, like oxen in the shambles, and plunged their sabres and bayonets into their bodies with grins of delight and ferocious laughter, and felt a horrible pleasure in seeing their victims writhe with heartbreaking cries in the last convulsions of death.
General Don Sebastian, though wounded, and who seemed to have been protected by a charm throughout this scene of carnage, defended himself like a lion against several soldiers, who tried in vain to transfix him with their bayonets. Leaning against a column he whirled his sabre round his head, evidently seeking death, but wishful to sell his life as dearly as possible.
Suddenly Valentine cleft his way through the combatants, followed by Belhumeur, Black Elk, and Curumilla, who were engaged in warding off the blows the soldiers incessantly made at him, and reached the general.
"Ah!" the latter said on perceiving him, "here you are at last, then."
And he dealt him a terrible blow, but Belhumeur parried it, and Valentine continued to advance.
"Withdraw," he said to the soldiers who surrounded the general, "this man belongs to me."
The soldiers, though they did not know the hunter, intimidated by the accent with which he uttered these words, and recognizing in him one of those rare men who can always impose on common natures, respectfully fell back without making the slightest objection.