All fell on their knees in the marsh; then, rising, they formed their ranks and began to advance, guided by the renegade Frenchman, whose hands, to make sure of him, were tied behind his back.  Groping and stumbling in the dark among trees, roots, and underbrush, buffeted by wind and rain, and slashed in the face by the recoiling boughs which they could not see, they soon lost their way, fell into confusion, and came to a stand, in a mood more savagely desponding than before.  But soon a glimmer of returning day came to their aid, and showed them the dusky sky, and the dark columns of the surrounding pines.  Menendez ordered the men forward on pain of death.  They obeyed, and presently, emerging from the forest, could dimly discern the ridge of a low hill, behind which, the Frenchman told them, was the fort.  Menendez, with a few officers and men, cautiously mounted to the top.  Beneath lay Fort Caroline, three gunshots distant; but the rain, the imperfect light, and a cluster of intervening houses prevented his seeing clearly, and he sent two officers to reconnoitre.  Descending, they met a solitary Frenchman, a straggler from the fort.  They knocked him down with a sheathed sword, took him prisoner, then stabbed him in cold blood.  This done, and their observations made, they returned to the top of the hill, behind which, clutching their weapons in fierce expectancy, all the gang stood waiting.

“Santiago!” cried Menendez.  “At them!  God is with us!”

And, shouting their hoarse war-cries, the Spaniards rushed down the slope like starved wolves.

Not a sentry was on the rampart.  La Vigne, the officer of the guard, had just gone to his quarters, but a trumpeter, who chanced to remain, saw, through sheets of rain, the black swarm of assailants sweeping down the hill.  He blew the alarm, and at his shrill summons a few half-naked soldiers ran wildly out of the barracks.  It was too late.  Through the breaches, over the ramparts, the Spaniards came pouring in.

“Santiago!  Santiago!  Down with the Lutherans!”

Sick men leaped from their beds.  Women and children, blind with fright, darted shrieking from the houses.  A fierce gaunt visage, the thrust of a pike or blow of a rusty halberd,—­such was the greeting that met all alike.  Laudonniere snatched his sword and target, and ran towards the principal breach, calling to his soldiers.  A rush of Spaniards met him; his men were cut down around him; and he, with a soldier named Bartholomew, was forced back into the courtyard of his house.  Here a tent was pitched, and as the pursuers stumbled among the cords, he escaped behind Ottigny’s house, sprang through the breach in the western rampart, and fled for the woods.

Le Moyne had been one of the guard.  Scarcely had he thrown himself into a hammock which was slung in his room, when a savage shout, and a wild uproar of shrieks, outcries, and the clash of weapons, brought him to his feet.  He rushed past two Spaniards in the door-way, ran behind the guard-house leaped through an embrasure into the ditch, and escaped to the forest.