The firing of the castle, for some mad reason of the sort that mothers every catastrophe, caused them to disobey that order and, instead, to charge forward at the double.  In a moment the new fury (for it was not panic, nor yet exactly the reverse) communicated itself all along the road, and the regiments at the rear, in spite of the murderous fire from our ambush, yelled and milled to drive the men in front more swiftly.

Then Fred saw the castle flames, and led his men forward to plug up the lower end of the road.  Next Rustum Khan saw it, and advanced three hundred down the ramp to hold the ditch at the bottom and prevent reserves from coming to the rescue.

It was then, so he told us afterward, that Fred realized who was the person in authority who had sought to change the line of battle at the critical moment.  Mahmoud himself, surrounded by his staff, had ridden forward to see what the true nature of the difficulty might be, and had got caught in the trap when Fred closed it and Rustum Khan cut off the flow of men!

Fred did his best by rapid fire to put an end to Mahmoud, staff and all.  But the light from the castle did not reach down in among the trees, and when he told the nearest men who the target was that only made the shooting wilder.  Nor was Mahmoud a man without decision.  Realizing that he was trapped, at any rate from behind, he galloped forward with his staff, scattering bewildered men to right and left of him, to find out whether the trap could not be forced from the upper end, knowing that there were plenty of men on the road already to account for any possible total we could bring against them, if only they could be led forward and deployed.

So it came about that Mahmoud on a splendid war-horse, and five of his mounted staff, arrived at the head of the oncoming column; and Kagig saw them in a moment when the flare from the castle roared like a rocket hundreds of feet high and scattered all the shadows on that section of the road.  Kagig passed the word along, but it was Monty who devised the instant plan, and one of Will’s men who came running to find me.

So I forgot pain and disability in the excitement of having a part to play.  Gloria had found her way back to the castle, and it was she who rallied all the men and women who had worked at piling fuel, and brought them to where I lay.  Then I begged her to get back somewhere and hide, but she laughed at me.

Our business was to burry down the road and plug it against Mahmoud and his men, while Kagig got behind him by sheer hand-to-hand fighting, and Monty and Will approached him from the flanks.  We had to be cautious about shooting, because of Kagig, for one thing, but for another, Will had sent the message, “Don’t kill Mahmoud.”  And that, of course, was obvious.  Mahmoud alive would be worth a thousand to us of any Mahmoud dead.

Gloria ran down the road beside me, and Will caught sight of her in the dancing light.  I heard him shout something in United States English about women and hell-fire and burned fingers, but beyond that it was not polite, and was intended for me as much as for Gloria, I did not get the gist of it.  Then the battle closed up around us, and we all fought hand to hand—­women harder than the men—­to close in on Mahmoud and drag him from his horse.