k the earth as if by volcanic force. Then came the
crashing of timbers, the cracking of masonry, the whirring of a thousand
missiles through the air. Before the very eyes of the stunned,
bewildered defenders, dismounting near the parade ground, the huge gates
and pillars fell to the ground.

The gates have been dynamited!

Then it was that Truxton King remembered. Marlanx's sappers had been
quietly at work for days, drilling from the common to the gates. It was
a strange coincidence that Marlanx should have chosen this day for his
culminating assault on the Castle. The skirmish at daybreak had hurried
his arrangements, no doubt, but none the less were his plans complete.
The explosives had been laid during the night; the fuses reached to the
mouth of the tunnel, across the common. As he swept up the avenue at the
head of his command, hawk-faced and with glittering eyes, he snarled the
command that put fire to the fuses. He was still a quarter of a mile
away when the gates crumbled. With short, shrill cries, scarcely human
in their viciousness, he urged his men forward. He and Brutus were the
first to ride up to the great hole that yawned where the gates had
stood. Beyond they could see the distracted soldiers of the Prince
forming in line to resist attack.

A moment later his vanguard streamed through the aperture and faced the
deadly fire from the driveway.

Like a stone wall the men under Quinnox stood their ground; a solid,
defiant line that fired with telling accuracy into the struggling horde.
On the walls two Gatling guns began to cackle their laugh of death. And
still the mercenaries poured through the gap, forming in haphazard lines
under the direction of the maddened Iron Count.

At last they began to advance across the grassy meadow. When one man
fell under the fire of the Guardsmen, another rushed into his place.
Three times the indomitable Graustarkians drove them back, and as often
did Marlanx drag them up again, exalted by the example he set.

"'Gad, he _is_ a soldier," cried Truxton, who had wasted a half dozen
shots in the effort to bring him down. "Hello! There's my friend Brutus.
He's no coward, either. Here's a try for you, Brutus."

He dropped to his knee and took deliberate aim at the frenzied henchman.
The discovery that there were three bullets in Brutus's breast when he
was picked up long afterward did not affect the young man's contention
that his was the one that had found the heart.