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 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.
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