"All right,"' said the Doctor, who never changed in his cool self-possession.
But now the Italians with curses and screams came back to the attack. It is absolutely stupefying to think how few shots hit the mark in the excitement of a fight. Here were a number of men firing from a distance of hardly more than forty paces, and not one took effect.
The next moment the whole crowd were upon them. Buttons snatched Mr. Figgs's razor from his grasp and used it vigorously. Dick plied his bowie-knife. The Senator wielded a clubbed rifle on high as though it were a wand, and dealt the blows of a giant upon the heads of his assailants. All the Italians were physically their inferiors--small, puny men. Mr. Figgs made a wild dash at the first man he saw and seized his rifle. The fight was spirited.
The rascally brigands were nearly three times as numerous, but the Americans surpassed them in bodily strength and spirit.
Crash--crash--fell the Senator's rifle, and down went two men. His strength was enormous--absorbed as it had been from the granite cliffs of the old Granite State. Two brawny fellows seized him from behind. A thrust of his elbow laid one low. Buttons slashed the wrist of the other. A fellow threw himself on Buttons. Dick's bowie-knife laid open his arm and thigh. The next moment Dick went down beneath the blows of several Italians. But Buttons rushed with his razor to rescue Dick. Three men glared at him with uplifted weapons. Down came the Senator's clubbed rifle like an avalanche, sweeping their weapons over the cliff. They turned simultaneously on the Senator, and grasped him in a threefold embrace. Buttons's razor again drank blood. Two turned upon him. Bang! went the Doctor's pistol, sending one of them shrieking to the ground. Bang! Once more, and a fellow who had nearly overpowered the breathless Figgs staggered back. Dick was writhing on the ground beneath the weight of a dead man and a fellow who was trying to suffocate him. Buttons was being throttled by three others who held him powerless, his razor being broken. A crack on Mr. Figgs's head laid him low. The Doctor stood off at a little distance hastily reloading.
The Senator alone was free; but six fierce fellows assailed him. It was now as in the old Homeric days, when the heroic soul, sustained by iron nerve and mighty muscle, came out particularly strong in the hour of conflict.
The Senator's form towered up like one of his own granite cliffs in the storm--as rugged, as unconquerable. His blood was up! The same blood it was that coursed through the veins of Cromwell's grim old "Ironsides," and afterward animated those sturdy backwoods-men who had planted themselves in American forests, and beaten back wild beasts and howling savages.
Buttons, prostrate on the ground, looked up, gasping through the smoke and dust, as he struggled with his assailants. He saw the Senator, his hair bristling out straight, his teeth set, his eye on fire, his whole expression sublimed by the ardor of battle. His clothes were torn to shreds; his coat was gone, his hat nowhere, his hands and face were covered with clots of blood and streaks from mud, dust, smoke, and powder.
The eye of Buttons took in all this in one glance. The next instant, with a wide sweep of his clubbed rifle the Senator put forth all his gigantic strength in one tremendous effort. The shock was irresistible. Down went the six bandits as though a cannon-ball had struck them. The Senator leaped away to relieve Dick, and seizing his assailant by neck and heel, flung him over the cliff. Then tearing away another from Mr. Figgs's prostrate and almost senseless form, he rushed back upon the six men whom he had just levelled to the earth.
Dick sprang to the relief of Buttons, who was at his last extremity. But the Doctor was before him, as cool as ever. He grasped one fellow by the throat--a favorite trick of the Doctor's, in which his anatomical knowledge came very finely into play: