The drummer turned and scuttled toward the manhole. As he straightened and went flying down the steps, he heard a great booming echoing through the palace.
It was the "reds" thundering with their wooden rams against the doors of the building. When Strawbridge got below, the whole palace shook with the blows. All the inner doors along the central hallway stood open, and soldiers darted in and out of the rooms to fire through the windows. Rifle-shots roared through the place, and the stinking haze of smokeless powder floated out into the corridor through the tops of the doors and settled against the roof.
Some impulse sent Strawbridge running to the señora's room. As he dodged inside, he saw two groups of soldiers crouched in the corners and raking the windows with their fire. Some of their bullets bit pieces out of the iron window bars. At regular intervals the end of a heavy beam crashed against the bars and slowly bent the heavy grille inward. One by one the anchorages in the stone casing broke loose.
The two squads of peon soldiers were barricaded behind delicate dressing-tables and exquisitely wrought chairs; half a dozen guards knelt behind a canopied four-poster. Their rifles were leveled across an embroidered silk coverlet. Everything in the room still looked incongruously feminine, even with men firing across it and a dead soldier sprawled on a couch. Now and then a bullet drilled a neat hole in an old-fashioned thin glass mirror in a dressing-stand. And notwithstanding the sharp stench of powder-gas, still a faint feminine sweetness lingered in the señora's apartment, a gentle wraith that would not be exorcised.
Abruptly the whole of the bending bars broke loose and clanged down inside. Instantly the window was filled with crashing rifles. The concussion tore the drummer's ear-drums as he crouched behind the massive bed. Guards crumpled up out of both firing-squads. Bottles, brushes, and silver containers on the señora's dressing-table leaped to splinters. The next moment the window was full of the heads and shoulders of men, struggling to climb inside. They were the most ghastly human beings the drummer had ever imagined.
The few guards left in the room fired point-blank into these terrible creatures. Strawbridge caught up a gun and was on the point of firing. He was aiming down the barrel at a skull-like head when he recognized the tortured features and the burning monkey eyes of Josefa.
Such a revulsion swept over the American at the semblance of the little clerk that he dropped his rifle and crouched behind the silken bed. The prisoners in La Fortuna had been released. The mere horror of their faces must have shocked the remnant of the guard into flight. Those who were unwounded leaped from hiding and bolted for the door, shouting above the din, "Los presos! The prisoners are upon us! La Fortuna has fallen!" They rushed pell-mell into the hallway, still shouting their warning until their voices were lost in the din.
Strawbridge stared at these animated cadavers. Whether they recognized and spared him as an American, or whether they overlooked him among the wounded and dead, he never knew. The disinterred wretches streamed past, with unshaven faces, with yellow skins sticking to the very bones of their skulls, with eyes lost in bony pits, with lips stretched across teeth in wrinkles. Their clothes were torn filth and sores. Into the boudoir with them gushed the smell of rotting flesh and latrines. This was the very dung of Venezuelan society; it was the cesspool of the prison regurgitating into the palace; it was human sewage flowing backward. It was inexpressibly obscene.
Nausea overcome Strawbridge; yet as they passed into the hallway he struggled up and followed them. The corridor was a haze filled with flashing rifles. Out of half a dozen rooms poured other assailants, who had succeeded in breaking through the windows—other prisoners, other "reds," other insurgent soldiers, all mixed in the maddest confusion. They collected themselves under some leader; they formed themselves into a regiment and then went pouring through the doorway onto the staircase leading to the roof.
The drummer stood watching the scarecrow fighters as if hypnotized. He watched them swirl into the passage that led above. Suddenly, above the tumult, he heard the hard, shuddering reports of the machine-guns. A storm of steel burst down on the ghastly assailants, bearing them backward: the skeleton regiment recoiled, bent low, and started climbing again, struggling up over their fallen comrades straight into the muzzles of the guns. Ghastly croaking shouts; thin, rattling huzzas; the clatter of the guns; the reek of ordure and sores; the inferno roared on. The rattle of the machine-guns was dwindling. Strawbridge heard hoarse coughing cries: "Down with Fombombo! There he is! Strike him! Stab! Shoot! Here he is, over with him!" The drummer wondered what thoughts burned through the dictator's mind as he faced his horrible enemies. The cesspool of the prison had belched back, clear up to the roof of the palace, and General Fombombo was inundated.