“To your left! To your left!” The voice came to him clear and sweet above the swelling growl of the rabble. “The doorway! Get into the doorway, Mr. Beetle Man.”
A few paces away, how far Perkins could only guess, was the entrance to the house. He surmised that, like many of the better-class houses, it had a small set-in door, at right angles to the main entrance, that would serve as a shallow shelter. Without raising his eyes, he nodded comprehension, and began to edge along the wall, swinging his stout weapon. As he went, he wondered what was keeping the others. At that moment the others were frantically wrestling with the all-too-adequate bars with which Sherwen had reinforced the wide door.
Perkins, feeling with a cautious heel, found himself opposite the entry indicated by the voice. Turning, he darted into the narrow embrasure. Here he was comparatively safe from the missiles that were now coming from all directions. On the other hand, he now lacked room to swing his formidable club. The peons, with a shout, closed in to arm’s length. Alone on her balcony, the girl turned her head away and cried aloud, hopelessly, for help. She wanted to close her ears against the bestial shouts of a mob trampling to death a defenseless man, but her arms were of lead. She listened and shivered.
Instead of the sound that she dreaded there came the ringing of hoofs on stones, followed by yells of alarm. She opened her eyes to see Von Plaanden, bent forward in his saddle at the exact angle proper to the charge, urging his great horse down upon the mass of people as ruthlessly as if they had been so many insects. Through the circle he broke, swinging his mount around beside the shallow doorway before which three Caracuñans already lay sprawled, attesting the vigor of the defender’s final resistance. Back of the horseman lay half a dozen other figures. The Hochwaldian jerked out his sword and stood, a splendid spectacle. Very possibly he was not wholly unmindful of his own pictorial quality or of the lovely American witness thereto.
His intervention gave a few seconds’ respite, one of those checks that save battles and make history. Now, in the further making of this particular history, sounded a lusty whoop from the opposite direction; such a battle slogan as only the Anglo-Saxon gives. It emanated from Galpy the bounder, bounding now, indeed, at full speed up the slope, followed by two of his fellow railroad men, flannel-clad and still perspiring from their afternoon’s cricket. Against bare legs a cricket bat is a highly dissuasive argument. The Britons swung low and hard for the ancient right of the breed to break into a row wherever white men are in the minority against other races. The downhill wing of the mob being much the weakest, opened up for them with little resistance, leaving them a free path to the cavalryman, to whose side Perkins, with staff ready brandished, had advanced from his shelter.
“Wot’s the merry game?” inquired the cockney cheerfully.
Before them the crowd swayed and parted, and there appeared, lifted by many arms, a figure with a dead-white face streaked with blood, running from a great gash in the scalp.
“He went down in front of my horse,” explained the Hochwald secretary coolly.
At the sight, there rose from the crowd a wailing cry, quite different from its former voice. Galpy’s teeth set and his cricket bat went up in the air.
“There’ll be killing for this,” he said. “I know these blightehs. That yell means blood. We must make a bolt for it. Is this all there is of us?”