Below, in that hall, were mustered De Bois-Vallée and some men--Beaujos being absent. Upon the huge table which had stood for unnumbered years within it, were laid all the firearms which they could hastily gather together; muskets and musketoons, fuzils and fuzees, pistols and petronels. Also other arms, halberds, axes, swords--they meant to make a stand for it!
As for De Bois-Vallée himself--his look appalled the women, if not Andrew, as they gazed down on him. His face was white--was it with fear or rage!--as he bent over the table, and, selecting two carbines, loaded them carefully; upon it, as he turned towards the great porte, outside which the murmurs had now increased to a roar, accompanied by heavy knocks and thumps--there was the grin of a devil at bay. Then, suddenly, they saw him point to a spot away down one of the passages leading out of the hall, saw the man Brach disappear, and, a moment or two later, come back, bearing in his arms a long ladder which he placed against the door. While, casting his eyes up over that door, Andrew saw that, above it, was a little window unnoticed hitherto by him--a window a foot square, but covered inside with a close-fitting shutter. And, since a few moments later he saw there was no glass to it, he judged that it was used only to admit air.
As he watched thus the trapped man in his own house, he saw him slowly mount half-way up that ladder, so that, at last, the top of his head was almost level with the lower part of the shutter, and take the carbines from his servitor's hands--then saw him suddenly stop in his upward progress. Stop, clinging to the ladder posts, his face half-turned round to those in the hall, the grin upon that face horribly intensified. For, even as he had thus half-mounted it, the beatings on the door against which the ladder leant had been redoubled.
"Surely," whispered Andrew, "they are using some tree-trunk as battering ram"--and it seemed as if the next moment must see that door fall in from the tremendous blows administered from the outside.
Next, a babel of voices and a shouting arose.
"Is the wolf there?" one called, while even as he did so another answered: "Be very sure he is"; and others were heard shouting: "Bring him forth. Give him to us, and we spare the house. Otherwise all are doomed."
And again the beatings and the buffetings were renewed, while now a part of the door a few feet from the ground was burst in, and through it there protruded the jagged edge of a hastily-chopped-down tree.
Andrew had guessed aright! They were using roughly-improvised battering rams!
For a moment the hunted wretch--the man caught like a rat in a trap--glared round his hall; even in the dim light and gloom Andrew could see his tongue rolling over his lips as though to moisten their feverish burning, then, urged by God knows what desperation--the desperation perhaps of despair, perhaps of tigerish rage and ferocity!--he leapt up the last remaining rungs of the ladder, carrying the carbines in his hand.
Leapt up, as the wild cat leaps up the branches of forest trees, until he was level with the little shutter, flung it open with one hand, and, in an instant, had discharged both carbines into the midst of whatever crowd might be without.