Suddenly a shepherd in his straw hut, where he lay to guard the grain, seized with mad panic at sight of so many armed men, started to run up the hill, yelling, “Help!  Help!” And his screams echoed in the olive grove.

Then it was that the Radusani charged.  Among tree-trunks and dry reeds the silver saint tottered, ringing as he struck low branches, and glittering momentarily at every steep place in the path.  Ten, twelve, twenty guns, in a vibrating flash, rattled their shot against the mass of houses.  Crashes, then cries, were heard; then a great commotion.  Doors were opened; others were slammed shut.  Window-panes fell shattered.  Vases fell from the church and broke on the street.  In the track of the assailants a white smoke rose quietly up through the incandescent air.  They all, blinded and in bestial rage, cried, “Kill! kill!”

A group of fanatics remained about San Pantaleone.  Atrocious insults for San Gonselvo broke out amid waving scythes and brandished hooks: 

“Thief!  Thief!  Beggar!  The candles!  The candles!”

Other bands took the houses by assault, breaking down the doors with hatchets.  And as they fell, unhinged and shivered, San Pantaleone’s followers leaped in, howling, to kill the defenders.

The women, half-naked, took refuge in corners, imploring pity.  They warded off the blows, grasping the weapons and cutting their fingers.  They rolled at full length on the floor, amid heaps of blankets and sheets.

Giacobbe, long, quick, red as a Turkish scimitar, led the persecution, stopping ever and anon to make sweeping imperious gestures over the heads of the others with a great scythe.  Pallid, bare-headed, he held the van, in the name of San Pantaleone.  More than thirty men followed him.  They all had a dull, confused sense of walking through a conflagration, over quaking ground, and beneath a blazing vault ready to crumble.

But from all sides began to come the defenders, the Mascalicesi, strong and dark as mulattos, sanguinary foes, fighting with long spring-bladed knives, and aiming at the belly and the throat, with guttural cries at every blow.

The melee rolled away, step by step, towards the church.  From the roofs of two or three houses flames were already bursting.  A horde of women and children, wan-eyed and terror-stricken, were fleeing headlong among the olive trees.  Then the hand-to-hand struggle between the males, unimpeded by tears and lamentations, became more concentrated and ferocious.

Under the rust-colored sky, the ground was strewn with corpses.  Broken imprecations were hissed through the teeth of the wounded; and steadily, through all the clamor, still came the cry of the Radusani: 

“The candles!  The candles!”

But the enormous church door of oak, studded with nails, remained barred.  The Mascalicesi defended it against the pushing crowd and the axes.  The white, impassive silver saint oscillated in the thick of the fight, still upheld on the shoulders of the four giants, who refused to fall, though bleeding from head to foot.  It was the supreme desire of the assailants to place their idol on the enemy’s altar.