The hot night filled with noise, the scream of wounded steeds and the
shouting of men. Lights flared in the windows, and women wailed to all
the saints. Stubbornly the English drove back the Spanish, foot by foot,
the way they had come, down the street of heat and clamor. In the dark
hour before the dawn De Guardiola sounded a retreat, rode with his
defeated band up the pallid hillside, through the serpent-haunted tunal,
over the dreadfully peopled moat into the court of the white stone
fortress. There, grim and gray, with closed lips and glowing eyes, he
for a moment sat his horse in the midst of his spent men, then heavily
dismounted, and called to him Pedro Mexia, who, several days before, had
abandoned the battery at the river's mouth, fleeing with the remnant of
his company to the fortress. The two went together into the hall, and
there, while his squire unarmed De Guardiola, the lesser man spoke
fluently, consigning to all the torments of hell the strangers in
Nueva Cordoba.

"Go to; you are drunken!" said De Guardiola, coldly. "You speak what you
cannot act."

"I have three houses in the town," swore the other. "A reasonable
ransom--"

"There is no longer any question of ransom," answered Don Luiz.
"Fellow"--to the armorer,--"fetch me a surgeon."

Mexia sat upright, his eyes widening: "No question of ransom! I thank
the saints that I am no hidalgo! Now had simple Pedro Mexia been
somewhat roughly handled, unhorsed mayhap, even the foot of an English
heretic planted on his breast, I think that talk of the ransom of Nueva
Cordoba would not have ceased. But Don Luiz de Guardiola!--quite another