dozen
others fell dead. The rest had broken away in retreat,--a rabble
without a commander,--carrying the wounded. Behind the barricade was
almost as great confusion among the English, for Quebec's defenders
were made up of boys of fifteen and old men of seventy, and the first
crash of battle had been followed by a panic, when half the guards
would have thrown down their arms if one John Coffin, an expelled
royalist from Boston, had not shouted out that he would throw the first
man who attempted to desert into the river.

Meantime, how had it gone with Arnold?

[Illustration: SIR GUY CARLETON]

An English officer was passing near St. Louis Gate when, sometime after
two o'clock, he noticed rockets go up from the river beyond Cape
Diamond. He at once sounded the alarm. Bugles called to arms, drums
rolled, and every bell in the city was set ringing. In less than ten
minutes every man of Quebec's eighteen hundred was in place. American
soldiers marching through St. Roch, Lower Town, have described how the
tolling of the bells rolling through the storm smote cold on their
hearts, for they knew their designs had been discovered, and they could
not turn back, for a juncture must be effected with Montgomery. A
moment later the sham assaults were peppering the rear gates of Quebec,
but Guy Carleton was too crafty a campaigner to be tricked by any sham.
He rightly guessed that the real attack {307} would be made on one of
the two weaker spots leading up from Lower Town. "Now is the time to
show what stuff you are made of," he called to the soldiers, as he
ordered more detachments to the place whence came crash of heaviest
firing. This was at Sault-au-Matelot Street, a narrow, steep
thoroughfare, barely twenty feet from side to side. Up this little
tunnel of a street Arnold had rushed his men, surmounting one barricade
where they exchanged their own wet muskets for the dry guns of the
English deserters, dashing into houses to get possession of windows as
vantage points, over, some accounts say, yet another obstruction, till
his whole army was cooped up in a canyon of a street directly below the
hill front on which had been erected a platform with heavy guns. It
was a gallant rush, but it was futile, for now Carleton outgeneraled
Arnold. Guessing from the distance of the shots that the attack to the
rear was sheer sham, the English general rushed his fighters downhill
by another gate to catch Arnold on the rear. Que