"That"s Urgante," growled Cluff; "that devil with the flag."
"But he seems to be eulogizing it," cried the girl.
The orator had set down his bright burden, wedging it in the iron guard railing of a tree, and was now apostrophizing it with extravagant bows and honeyed accents in which there was an undertone of hiss. For confirmation, Miss Polly turned to the others. The first face her eyes fell on was that of the ball-player. Every muscle in it was drawn, and from the tightened lips streamed such whispered curses as the girl never before had heard. Next him stood the hermit, solid and still, but with a queer spreading pallor under his tan. In front of them Sherwen was crouched, scowlingly alert. The expression of Mr. Brewster and Carroll, neither of whom understood Spanish, betokened watchful puzzlement.
Enlightenment burst upon them the next minute. From the motley crowd below rose a snarl of laughter and savage jeering, the object of which was unmistakable.
"By G--d!" cried Mr. Brewster, straightening up and grasping the railing. "They"re insulting the flag!"
"I"ve left my pistol!" muttered Carroll, white-lipped. "I"ve left my pistol!"
Polly Brewster"s hand flew to her belt.
She drew out the automatic and held it toward the Southerner. But it was not Carroll"s hand that met hers; it was the Unspeakable Perk"s.
"No," said he, and he flung the weapon back of him into the patio.
"Oh! Oh!" cried the girl. "You unspeakable coward!"
Carroll jumped forward, but Sherwen was equally quick. He interposed his slight frame.
"Perkins is right," he said decisively. "No shooting. It would be worth the life of every one here. We"ve got to stand it. But somebody is going to sweat blood for this day"s work!"
The instinct of discipline, characteristic of the professional athlete, brought Cluff to his support.
"What Mr. Sherwen says, goes," he said, almost choking on the words.
"We"ve got to stand it."
In the breast of Miss Polly Brewster was no response to this spirit. She was lawless with the lawlessness of unconquered youth and beauty.
"Oh!" she breathed "If I had my pistol back, I"d shoot that BEAST myself!"
The scientist turned his goggles hesitantly upon her.
"Miss Brewster," he began, "please don"t think--"
"Don"t speak to me!" she cried.
Another clamor of derision sounded from the street as Urgante resumed the standard of his mockery and led his rabble forward. Behind the dull-colored ma.s.s appeared a spot of splendor. It was Von Plaanden, gorgeous in his full regalia, who had turned the corner, returning from the public reception. Well back of the mob, he pulled his horse up, and sat watching. The coincidence was unfortunate. It seemed to justify Sherwen"s bitter words:--
"Come to visa his work. There"s the Hochwaldian for you!"
Forward danced and reeled the "Yanki" baiters below, until they were under the balcony where the little group of Americans sheltered and raged silently. There the orator again spewed forth his contempt upon the alien banner, and again the ranks behind him shrieked their approval of the affront. Miss Polly Brewster, American of Americans, whose great-grandfathers had fought with Herkimer and Steuben,--themselves the sons of women who had stood by the loopholes of log houses and caught up the rifles of their fallen pioneer husbands, wherewith to return the fire of the besieging Mohawks,--ran forward to the railing, s.n.a.t.c.hing her skirt from the detaining grasp of her father. In the corner stood a huge bowl of roses. Gathering both hands full, she leaned forward and flung them, so that they fell in a shower of loveliness upon the insulted flag of her nation.
For an instant silence fell upon the "great unwashed" below. Out of it swelled a muttering as the leader made a low, mocking obeisance to the girl, following it with a word that brought a jubilant yelp from his adherents. Stooping, he ladled up in his cupped hand a quant.i.ty of gutter filth. Where the flowers had but a moment before fluttered in the folds, he splotched it, smearing star, bar, and blue with its blackness.
At the sight, the girl burst into helpless tears, and so stood weeping, openly, bitterly, and unashamed.
No brain is so well ordered, no emotion so thoroughly controlled, but that under sudden pressure--click!--the mechanism slips a cog and runs amuck. Just that thing happened inside the Unspeakable Perk"s smooth-running, scientific brain upon incitement of his flag"s desecration and his lady"s grief. To her it seemed that he shot past her horizontally like a human dart. The next second he was over the railing, had swung from a branch of the neighboring tree to the trunk, and leaped to the ground, all in one movement of superhuman agility. To the mob his exploit was apparently without immediate significance. Perhaps they didn"t notice the descent; or perhaps those few who saw were so astonished at the apparition of a chunky tree-man with protuberant eyes scrambling down upon them in the manner of an ape, that they failed to appreciate what it might portend of trouble.
The hermit landed solidly on his feet a few yards from Urgante, the flag bearer. With a berserker yell, he rushed. Taken by surprise, the a.s.sailed one still had time to lift the heavy staff. As quickly, the American lowered his head and dove. It may not have been magnificent; it certainly was not war by the rules; but it was eminently effective. To say that the leader went down would be absurdly inadequate. He simply crumpled. Over and over he rolled on the cobbles, while the smirched flag flew clear of his grasp, and fell on the farther sidewalk.
"Wow!" yelled Cluff, leaping into the air. "Football! That cost him a couple of ribs. Hey, Rube!"
And he rushed for the stairs, followed by Carroll, Sherwen, and, only one jump behind, Mr. Thatcher Brewster, cursing in a manner that did credit to his patriotism, but would have added no l.u.s.ter to his record as an elder of the Pioneer Presbyterian Church, of Utica, New York.
Meantime, the Unspeakable Perk, having rolled free of the fallen enemy, staggered to his feet and caught up the flag. Stunned surprise on the part of the crowd gave him an instant"s time. He edged along the curb, hoping to gain the legation door by a rush. But the foe threw out a wing, cutting him off. Several eager followers had lifted Urgante, whose groans and curses suggested a sound basis for Cluff"s diagnosis. Himself quite hors de combat, he spat at the Unspeakable Perk, and cried upon his henchmen to kill the "Yanki." It seemed not improbable to the latter that they would do it. Perkins set his back to the wall, twirled the flag folds tight around the pole, reversed and clubbed the staff, and prepared to make any attempt at killing as uncomfortable and unprofitable as possible. The rabble, by no means favorably impressed by these businesslike proceedings, stood back, growling.
A hand flew up above the crowd. The Unspeakable Perk ducked sharply and just in time, as a knife struck the wall above him and clattered to the pavement. Instantly he caught it up, but the blade had snapped off short. As he stooped, one bold spirit rushed in. Perkins met him with a straight lance-thrust of the staff, which sent him reeling and shrieking with pain back to his fellows. But now another knife, and another, struck and fell from the wall at his back; badly aimed both, but presumably the forerunners of missiles, some of which would show better marksmanship. The a.s.sailed man cast a swift, desperate look about him; the crowd closed in a little. Obviously he must keep "eyes front."
"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-cla.s.s 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 b.e.s.t.i.a.l 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 ma.s.s 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 Caracunans 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 l.u.s.ty 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 c.o.c.kney 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?"
At the moment of his asking, it was. One half a second later, it wasn"t, as the last of the legation"s stubborn bars yielded, the door burst open, and the four Americans tumbled out at the charge, Cluff yelling insanely, Carroll in deadly quiet, Sherwen alertly scanning the adversaries for identifiable faces, and Elder Brewster still imperiling his soul by the fervor of his language. Each was armed with such casual weapons as he had been able to catch up. Carroll, a leap in advance of the rest, encountered an Indian drover, half-dodged a swinging blow from his whip, and sent him down with a broken shoulder from a chop with a baseball club that he had found in the hallway. A bull-like charge had carried Cluff deep among the Caracunans, where he encountered a huge peon, whom he seized and flung bodily over the iron guard of a samon tree, where the man hung, yelling dismally. Two other peons, who had seized the athlete around the knees, were all but brained by a stoneware gin bottle in the hands of Sherwen. Meanwhile, Mr. Brewster was performing prodigies with a niblick which he had extracted, at full run, from a bag opportunely resting against the hat-rack. Almost before they knew it, the rescue party had broken the intercepting wing of the mob, and had joined the others.
Cluff threw a gorilla-like arm across the Unspeakable Perk"s shoulder,
"Hurt, boy?" he cried anxiously.
"No, I"m all right. Who"s left with Miss Brewster?"
"n.o.body. We must get back."
Sherwen"s cool voice cut in:--
"Close together, now. Keep well up. Herr von Plaanden, will you cover us at the end?"
"It is the post of honor," said the Hochwaldian.
"You"ve earned it. But for you, they"d have got our colors."