A sea bird flew overhead with a wailing cry; down in the moat a crocodile raised his horrible, fanged snout, then sank beneath the still water.  Don Luiz turned his bloodshot eyes upon the town in jeopardy and the bland and mocking ocean, so guileless of those longed-for sails.  The four ships in the river’s mouth!—­silently he cursed their every mast and spar, the holds agape for Spanish treasure, the decks whereon he saw men moving, the flags and streaming pennants flaunting interrogation of Spain’s boasted power.  A cold fury mounted from Don Luiz’s heart to his brain.  Of late he had slept not at all, eaten little, drunken no great amount of wine.  Like a shaken carpet the plain rose and fell; a mirage lifted the coasts of distant islands, piling them above the horizon into castles and fortifications baseless as a dream.  The sun dipped; up from the east rushed the night.  The tunal grew a dark smudge, drawn by a wizard forefinger around De Guardiola, his men-at-arms, the silver bars and the gold crescents from Guiana.  Out swung the stars, blazing, mighty, with black spaces in between.  Again rang the trumpet, a high voice proclaiming eternal endeavor.  The wind began to blow, and on the plain the cacti, gloomy and fantastic sentinels, moved their stiff bodies, waved their twisted arms in gestures of strangeness and horror.  The Spaniard turned on his heel, went down to his men-at-arms where they kept watch and ward, and at midnight, riding like Death on a great, pale steed, led a hundred horsemen out of the fortress, through the tunal, and so down the hillside to the town.

The English sentries cried alarm.  In the square a man with a knot of velvet in his helm swung himself into the saddle of a captured war-horse, waved aside the blue-jerkined boy at the rein, in a word or two cried over his shoulder managed to impart to those behind him sheer assurance of victory, and was off to greet Don Luiz.  They met in the wide street leading from the square, De Guardiola with his hundred cavaliers and Mortimer Ferne with his chance medley of horse and foot.  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.