mbled Laurent; "just when everything was going so
beautifully!"

But suddenly Weiss was struck with an idea.

"Wait!"

He had thought of the dead soldier up in the garret above, and climbed
up the ladder to search for the cartridges he must have about him. A
wide space of the roof had been crushed in; he saw the blue sky, a
patch of bright, wholesome light that made him start. Not wishing to be
killed, he crawled over the floor on his hands and knees, then, when he
had the cartridges in his possession, some thirty of them, he made haste
down again as fast his legs could carry him.

Downstairs, as he was sharing his newly acquired treasure with the
gardener's lad, a soldier uttered a piercing cry and sank to his knees.
They were but seven; and presently they were but six, a bullet having
entered the corporal's head at the eye and lodged in the brain.

From that time on, Weiss had no distinct consciousness of what was
going on around him; he and the five others continued to blaze away
like lunatics, expending their cartridges, with not the faintest idea in
their heads that there could be such a thing as surrender. In the three
small rooms the floor was strewn with fragments of the broken furniture.
Ingress and egress were barred by the corpses that lay before the doors;
in one corner a wounded man kept up a pitiful wail that was frightful to
hear. Every inch of the floor was slippery with blood; a thin stream of
blood from the attic was crawling lazily down the stairs. And the air
was scarce respirable, an air thick and hot with sulphurous fumes, heavy
with smoke, filled with an acrid, nauseating dust; a darkness dense
as that of night, through which darted the red flame-tongues of the
musketry.

"By God's thunder!" cried Weiss, "they are bringing up artillery!"

It was true. Despairing of ever reducing that handful of madmen, who had
consumed so much of their time, the Bavarians had run up a gun to the
corner of the Place de l'Eglise, and were putting it into position;
perhaps they would be allowed to pass when they should have knocked the
house to pieces with their solid shot. And the honor there was to them
in the proceeding, the gun trained on them down there in the square,
excited the bitter merriment of the besieged; the utmost intensity
of scorn was in their gibes. Ah! the cowardly _bougres_, with their
artillery! Kneeling in his old place still, Laurent carefully adjusted
his aim and each time picked off a