"But if the French attack in force you cannot escape."
"Caramba, Señor! What does that matter? A man must die, and I vow I'd rather die fighting for Saragossa than of fever in the cellars—or of rage in a French prison."
"You are a true son of Spain, hombre," exclaimed Jack, and the gleam in Arcos's eyes showed that he wished for no higher praise. "The barricades, now—it is useless to attempt to repair them?"
"Sí, Señor," replied Tio Jorge, "but we can fill up the breaches with sacks and baskets of earth, if we push them out from the sides of the street."
"Very well. Will you see that that is done?"
Tio Jorge instantly departed on his errand. Arcos had already gone to select his twenty men for the perilous post in the ruins of Vallejo.
At half-past three in the afternoon the French cannonade suddenly ceased. Jack had placed his men in position, but as he saw that nearly a thousand men were being launched against scarcely more than two hundred, he felt that even the desperate valour of his patriotic troops could not prevail against such odds. But it never occurred to him, or to a single member of his gallant force, that there was any alternative to the one simple course—to hold on to the end. Palafox had entrusted him with the defence of that quarter; he would defend it to the last gasp, and he knew that no British officer in the same situation would have come to any other conclusion.
The attack had begun. In the two streets the French were rushing ten abreast at the barricades. In the ruins approaching Vega and Vallejo their formation was necessarily broken, but they swept forward with a dash and a courage which Jack, remembering their former failures, could not but regard as magnificent. The front ranks seemed to melt away under the fire of the defenders, who, well disciplined by their long experience, fired calmly and with deadly accuracy, wasting no powder, and watching the French advance in seeming unconcern. But though the enemy fell by scores, there was no halting now. They swarmed up to and through the breached barricades, and ran a race with death towards the grim skeletons of the shattered houses. For a few seconds there was a tense silence; the majority of the defenders had discharged their pieces and were either reloading or preparing to repel with the bayonet. Then the opposing forces met; there was a sudden babel of noise, steel clashing against steel, pistols cracking, men shouting fiercely in their several tongues, and some crying out in the agony of death. The street was narrow; for a time the French could make but little impression on the unbroken front opposed to them, but Jack, from his post on the roof of Hontanon, saw that it was now a question of the most desperate close fighting. As soon as the head of the attacking column was lost to view beneath him, he hurried down to take his part in the tremendous struggle.
It was as he had feared. As soon as the French swarmed over the Vallejo barricade, the Casa Vallejo and its garrison became completely isolated. At the moment of his arrival a furious fight was proceeding at the inner barricade. The French charge, led by a gigantic Polish officer, had driven the Spaniards behind their last defence and threatened to dislodge them from that. Jack at once summoned twenty men from the reserve stationed at the Casa Alvarez, and with them threw himself into the breach, where, amid fragments of beams, displaced sacks and baskets of earth, and the débris of part of the wall of Vallejo thrown down by the explosion of the fougasse, a stern hand-to-hand fight was being waged. It was almost impossible, in the turmoil and rush, to distinguish friends from foes, but in the centre of the human whirlpool the huge form of the Polish officer was conspicuous. He was wielding a large bar of iron, which he had picked up among the ruins, and even at that moment Jack marvelled at the man's immense strength. Disdaining the blows aimed at him by men who looked mere pigmies beside him, he was step by step forcing a way through the barricade towards the open space fronting the Casa Alvarez. Jack, with his reinforcements, had arrived not a moment too soon. As he pushed through towards the spot where the deadly iron, wielded with as much ease as though it had been a malacca cane, rose and fell with fatal regularity, the onward rush of the French was stayed for a moment. Another second would have brought the two leaders together; but Jack was not yet to cross weapons with the Pole. At the very instant when they came within striking distance there was a terrible crash; Pole and Englishman started instinctively. A huge mass of masonry had fallen from Vallejo upon the outer barricade, into the midst of the crowded ranks of the Frenchmen, of whom a score at least were buried beneath the ruins. Even above the clash of weapons, the shouts of the combatants, and the groans of the wounded, a shrill mocking voice could be heard exulting in the deadly effect of the avalanche, and raining frantic curses upon the French. In the moment of surprise the enemy gave way. Glancing up, Jack saw the figure of the madwoman, the demented Doña Mercedes Ortega, giddily poised upon a jagged corner of masonry that threatened every instant to follow the rest into the street below. The poor creature had seen from the Casa Alvarez that the outer wall of Vallejo had been so breached that a push would precipitate it into the street upon the barricade. Escaping from Juanita's detaining hand, as Jack afterwards learnt, she had crept from the roof of the Casa Hontanon on to the wall of Vallejo; had leapt from point to point of the uneven summit, reached the corner overlooking the street, and with the strength of frenzy had pushed the masonry down, working more havoc among the enemy than had been wrought by many an elaborately-prepared mine.
While she stood on her precarious eminence, wildly gesticulating in her insane triumph, there was the report of a musket from down the street. She swayed for a brief moment upon the crumbling wall, uttered one heart-rending shriek of "Juanino!" and fell lifeless upon the ruins below.