But Count Hannibal gave no order, and, much as his people feared the cowls, they feared him more. Meanwhile the speaker's eloquence rose higher; he pointed with frenzied gestures to the house. The mob groaned, and suddenly a volley of stones fell among the pikemen, whose corselets rattled under the shower. The priest seized that moment. He sprang to the ground, and to the front. He caught up his robe and waved his hand, and the rabble, as if impelled by a single will, rolled forward in a huge one-fronted thundering wave, before which the two handfuls of pikemen--afraid to strike, yet afraid to fly--were swept away like straws upon the tide.
But against the solid walls and oak-barred door of the house the wave beat, only to fall back again, a broken, seething mass of brandished arms and ravening faces. One point alone was vulnerable, the window, and there in the gap stood Tavannes. Quick as thought he fired two pistols into the crowd; then, while the smoke for a moment hid all, he whistled.
Whether the signal was a summons to his men to fight their way back--as they were doing to the best of their power--or he had resources still unseen, was not to be known. For as the smoke began to rise, and while the rabble before the window, cowed by the fall of two of their number, were still pushing backward instead of forward, there rose behind them strange sounds--yells, and the clatter of hoofs, mingled with screams of alarm. A second, and into the loose skirts of the crowd came charging helter-skelter, pell-mell, a score of galloping, shrieking, cursing horsemen, attended by twice as many footmen, who clung to their stirrups or to the tails of the horses, and yelled and whooped, and struck in unison with the maddened riders.
"On! on!" the foremost shrieked, rolling in his saddle, and foaming at the mouth. "Bleed in August, bleed in May! Kill!" And he fired a pistol among the rabble, who fled every way to escape his rearing, plunging charger.
"Kill! Kill!" cried his followers, cutting the air with their swords, and rolling to and fro on their horses in drunken emulation. "Bleed in August, bleed in May!"
"On! On!" cried the leader, as the crowd which beset the house fled every way before his reckless onset. "Bleed in August, bleed in May!"