“Hah!” she muttered. “'Enery, they're cornin'. The worm is turnin', 'Enery; fifteen years you've wyted for vengeance, my love, but to-d'y you'll get it.”
She waddled out into the street and held up her hand in a gesture as authoritative and imperious as that of a traffic officer. “Batter-r-ry 'alt!” she croaked. She had heard the late 'Enery give that command often enough to have acquired the exact inflection necessary to make an impression upon men accustomed to obeying such a command whenever given. Instinctively the column slowed up; some of the Foreign Legion, old coast-artillerists, no doubt, came to a halt with promptness and precision; all stared at Mother Jenks.
“Ow about 'arf a dozen cases o' good brandy for the wounded?” Mother Jenks suggested. “An' 'ow about a bally old woman for a Red Cross nurse?”
“You're on, ma'am,” the foreign leader replied promptly, and translated the old lady's suggestion to Doctor Pacheco, who accepted gracefully and thanked Mother Jenks in purest Castilian. So a detail of six men was told off to carry the six cases of brandy out of El Buen Amigo and load them on the ammunition carts; then Mother Jenks crawled up into the armoured truck with the machine-gun crew, and the column once more took up its line of rapid march.
The objective of this unsuspected force within the city was, as Ricardo Ruey shrewdly suspected it might be, poorly garrisoned. Usually a force of fully five hundred men was stationed at the national arsenal, but the sharp, savage attack from the west, so sudden and unexpected, had thrown Sarros into a panic and left him no time to plan his defence carefully. His first thought had been to send all his available forces to support the troops bearing the brunt of the rebel attack, and it was tremendously important that this should be done very promptly, in view of the lack of information concerning the numerical force of the enemy; consequently he had reduced the arsenal force to one hundred men and retained only his favorite troop of the Guards and one company of the Fifteenth Infantry to protect the palace.
Acting under hastily given telephonic orders, the commanding officer at the cantonment barracks had detailed a few hundred men to fight a rear-guard action while the main army fell back in good order behind a railway embankment which swept in a wide arc around the city and offered an excellent substitute for breastworks. This position had scarcely been attained before the furious advance of the rebels drove in the rear guard, and pending the capture of the arsenal, Ricardo realized his operations were at an impasse. Promptly he dug himself in, and the battle developed into a brisk affair of give and take, involving meagre losses to both factions but an appalling wastage of ammunition.
The arsenal, a large, modern concrete building with tremendously thick walls reinforced by steel, would have offered fairly good resistance to the average field battery. Surrounding it on all four sides was a reinforced concrete wall thirty feet high, with machine-gun bastions at each corner and a platform along the wall, inside and twenty-five feet from the ground, which afforded foot room for infantry which could use the top five feet of the wall for protection while firing over it. There was but one entrance, a heavy, barred steel gate which was always kept locked when it was not necessary to have it opened for ingress or egress. Given warning of an attack and with sufficient time to prepare for it, one hundred of the right sort of fighting men could withstand an indefinite siege by a force not provided with artillery heavier than an ordinary field gun. With a full realization of this, therefore, Ricardo and his confrères had designed to accomplish by strategy that which could not be done by the limited forces at their command.
The tread of marching men, the purr of the motorcycles and the armoured truck, during the progress of the invaders up the Calle de Concordia, aroused the dwellers in that thoroughfare. Those who appeared in their' doorways, however, as promptly disappeared upon recognizing this indubitable evidence of local disturbance. As the column approached the neighbourhood of the arsenal, three detachments broke away from the main body and disappeared down side streets, to turn at right angles later and march parallel with the main command. Each of these detachments was accompanied by one unit of the motorcycle-mounted machine-gun battery with its white crew; two blocks beyond the arsenal square each detachment leader so disposed his men as to offer spirited resistance to any sortie that might be made by the troops from the palace in the hope of driving off the attackers of the arsenal.
Having thus provided for protection during its operations, the main body nominally under Doctor Pacheco but in reality commanded by the chief of the machine-gun company, proceeded to operate. With the utmost assurance in the world the armoured truck rolled down the street to the arsenal entrance, swung in and pointed its impudent nose straight at the iron bars while the hidden chauffeur called loudly and profanely in Spanish upon the sentry to open the gate and let him in—that there was necessity for great hurry, since he had been sent down from the palace by the présidente himself, for machine guns to equip this armoured motor-car. The sentry immediately called the officer of the guard, who peered out, observed nothing but the motor-truck, which seemed far from dangerous, and without further ado inserted a huge key in the lock and turned the bolt. The sentry swung the double gates ajar, and with a prolonged and raucous toot of its horn the big car loafed in. The sentry closed the gate again, while the officer stepped up to turn the key in the lock. Instead, he died with half a dozen pistol bullets through his body, while the sentry sprawled beside him.
The prolonged toot of the motor-horn had been the signal agreed upon to apprise the detachment waiting in a secluded back street that the truck was inside the arsenal wall. With a yell they swept out of the side street and down on the gate, through which they poured into the arsenal grounds. At sound of the first shot at the gate, the comandante of the garrison, which had been drawn up in double rank for reveille roll call, realized he was attacked and that swift measures were necessary. Fortunately for him, his men were standing at attention at the time, preparatory to receiving from him one of those ante-battle exhortations so dear to the Latin soul.