ines, while
Jago and the muleteers, hastily following their example with their
trabucos, half a dozen of the Spaniards bit the dust.

A short pause ensued. The shots from the thicket had come like a
thunderbolt upon the inhuman dragoons and their victims. The latter stared
for a few seconds wildly around them, as if uncertain whence came the
unexpected succour. Their indecision was put an end to by Jago.

"_Abajo con ellos!_" shouted he in a voice of thunder. "Down with the
dogs!"

And at the word, the Indians, rousing from their apathy, threw themselves
upon the dead and wounded Spaniards, wrested their weapons from them in
spite of the murderous blows of the other dragoons, and in their turn
assumed the offensive. Don Manuel's blood was now thoroughly heated with
the fight. Every shot that was fired at this elevation of ten thousand
feet above the sea, rolled and rattled its echoes round the hills in
long-continued thunder, and added to the din and excitement of the scene.

"Are you loaded?" cried the young nobleman, as he shot down the first man
of a detachment which was advancing to attack the new foe in his ambush.
Servants and muleteers followed his example, five more saddles were
emptied, and immediately the Indians threw themselves upon the fallen,
regardless of wounds, and seized their sabres and carbines. The fight grew
more furious in proportion as the sides became more equal.

"Thanks be to God and to your Senoria, our time is come!" murmured Jago.
And with the cry of "Death to the Gachupins!" he sprang from his cover,
and fell with a tiger's leap upon the dragoons. The latter began to lose
ground; for while twenty patriots, now well armed, found them occupation
in front, hundreds of others attacked them on the flanks and in rear,
climbing upon the cruppers of the horses, clasping the riders round the
body, and dragging them from the saddle. Even the wounded twined their
bleeding and mutilated limbs round the horses' legs, and made their sharp
teeth meet in the very muscle of the brutes, till the groans of pain of
the latter were heard mingling with the cries of the combatants. It was a
frightful group; the Indians were become incarnate fiends. The dragoons
had no room to use their weapons; they could scarcely move; men and horses
were intertwined with Indians, who clung to them like so many anacondas.
Hardly ten minutes had elapsed, and there were not thirty men left on
their horses.

Don Manuel had b