After ten or fifteen minutes of this desultory carnage, it was reported that a large force of men were entering the avenue from Regengetz Circus. Quinnox sent his chargers toward this great horde of foot-soldiers, but they did not falter as he had expected. On they swept, two or three thousand of them. At their head rode five or six officers. The foremost was Count Marlanx.
The cannons were booming now in the foothills. Marlanx, if he heard them and realised what the bombardment meant, did not swerve from the purpose at present in his mind.
Quinnox saw now that the Iron Count was determined to storm the gates, and gave the command to retreat. Waving their rifles and shouting defiance over their shoulders, the dragoons drew up, wheeled and galloped toward the gates.
Truxton King afterward recalled to mind certain huge piles of fresh earth in a corner of the common. He did not know what they meant at the time of observation, but he was wiser inside of three minutes after the whirlwind brigade dashed through the gates.
Scarcely were the massive portals closed and the great steel bars dropped into place by the men who attended them, when a low, dull explosion shook the earth as if by volcanic force. Then came the crashing of timbers, the cracking of masonry, the whirring of a thousand missiles through the air. Before the very eyes of the stunned, bewildered defenders, dismounting near the parade ground, the huge gates and pillars fell to the ground.
The gates have been dynamited!
Then it was that Truxton King remembered. Marlanx's sappers had been quietly at work for days, drilling from the common to the gates. It was a strange coincidence that Marlanx should have chosen this day for his culminating assault on the Castle. The skirmish at daybreak had hurried his arrangements, no doubt, but none the less were his plans complete. The explosives had been laid during the night; the fuses reached to the mouth of the tunnel, across the common. As he swept up the avenue at the head of his command, hawk-faced and with glittering eyes, he snarled the command that put fire to the fuses. He was still a quarter of a mile away when the gates crumbled. With short, shrill cries, scarcely human in their viciousness, he urged his men forward. He and Brutus were the first to ride up to the great hole that yawned where the gates had stood. Beyond they could see the distracted soldiers of the Prince forming in line to resist attack.
A moment later his vanguard streamed through the aperture and faced the deadly fire from the driveway.