Curfoot and Stull threw themselves against him, but Brandes, his round
face pasty with fury, struggled back again to confront Ilse Dumont.
"Ruined me!" he repeated. "Took away from me the only thing God ever
gave me for my own! Took my wife!"
"You dog!" said Ilse Dumont very slowly. "You dirty dog!"
A frightful spasm crossed Brandes' features, and Stull snatched at the
pistol he had whipped out. There was a struggle; Brandes wrenched the
weapon free; but Neeland tore his way past Curfoot and struck Brandes
in the face with the butt of his heavy revolver.
Instantly the group parted right and left; Sengoun suddenly twisted
out of the clutches of the men who held him, sprang upon Curfoot, and
jerked the pistol from his fist. At the same moment the entire front
of the café gave way and the mob crashed inward with a roar amid the
deafening din of shattered metal and the clash of splintering glass.
Through the dust and falling shower of débris, Brandes fired at Ilse
Dumont, reeled about in the whirl of the inrushing throng engulfing
him, still firing blindly at the woman who had been his wife.
Neeland put a bullet into his pistol arm, and it fell. But Brandes
stretched it out again with a supreme effort, pointing at Ilse Dumont
with jewelled and bloody fingers: "That woman is a German spy! A spy!" he screamed. "You damn French
mutts, do you understand what I say! Oh, my God! Will someone who
speaks French tell them! Will somebody tell them she's a spy! La
femme! Cette femme!" he shrieked. "Elle est espion! Esp----!" He
fired again, with his left hand. Then Sengoun shot him through the
head; and at the same moment somebody stabbed Curfoot in the neck; and
the lank American gambler turned and cried out to Stull in a voice
half strangled with pain and fury: "Look out, Ben. There are apaches in this mob! That one in the striped
jersey knifed me----"
"Tiens, v'la pour toi, sale mec de malheur!" muttered a voice at his
elbow, and a blow from a slung-shot crushed the base of his skull.
As Curfoot crumpled up, Stull caught him; but the tall gambler's dead
weight bore Stull to his knees among the fierce apaches.
And there, fighting in silence to the end, his chalky face of a sick
clown meeting undaunted the overwhelming odds against him, Stull was
set upon by the apaches and stabbed and stabbed until his clothing was
a heap of ribbons and the watch and packet of French bank-notes which
the assassins tore from his body were dripping with his blood.
Sengoun and Neeland, their evening clothes in tatters, hatless,
dishevelled, began shooting their way out of the hell of murder and
destruction raging around them.