Stern saw the swing and crushing impact of the maces and iron clubs; he saw the stabbing of the spears on both sides. Slippery and red the parapet became. Men, killed there, crawled and struggled and fell both outward and inside, and were trampled in indiscriminate heaps, besieged and besiegers alike, still clawing, tearing, howling even in their death agony. Now one of the ladders was down--another fell, with horrid tumult--a third! An automatic in each hand, Stern scrambled to the glairy summit of the fortification. A mace swung at him. He leaped sidewise, firing as he sprang. With a scream the ax-man doubled up and fell, and vanished in the gloom below the wall. Raking the parapet with a hail of lead, he mowed down the attackers on top of the fourth ladder. With a mighty shout, those inside staved it away with iron grapples. It, too, swayed drunkenly, held below, pushed madly above. It reeled--then fell with a horrible, grinding crash! "Hurray, boys! One more down! Give 'em Hell!" he screamed. "One more!" He turned. Subconsciously he felt that his right hand was wet, and hot, and dripping, but he felt no pain. "One more! Now for another!" And in the opposite direction along the wall he emptied his other revolver. Before the stinging swarm of the steel-jacketed wasps of death the Lanskaarn writhed and melted down with screams such as Dante in his wildest vision never even dreamed. Stern heard a great howl of triumph break from the mass of defenders fighting to overthrow the fifth ladder. "Hold 'em! Hold 'em!" he bellowed. "Wait till I load up again--I'll--" A swift and crashing impact dashed sheaves of radiant fire through his brain. Everything leaped and whirled. He flung up both hands. Clutching at empty air, then suddenly at the slippery parapet which seemed to have leaped up and struck him in the face, he fell. Came a strange numbness, then a stabbing pain. And darkness quenched all knowledge and all consciousness. CHAPTER XXIX SHADOWS OF WAR A blue and flickering gleam of light, dim, yet persistent, seemed to enhalo a woman's face; and as Stern's weary eyes opened under languid lids, closed, then opened again, the wounded engineer smiled in his weakness. "Beatrice!" he whispered, and tried to stretch a hand to her, as she sat beside his bed of seaweed covered with the coarse brown fabric. "Oh, Beatrice! Is this--is this another--hallucination?" She took the hand and kissed it, then bent above him and kissed him again, this time fair upon the lips. "No, boy," she answered. "No hallucination, but reality! You're all right now--and _I'm_ all right! You've had a little fever and--and--well, don't ask any questions, that's all. Here, drink this now and go to sleep!" She set a massive golden bowl to his mouth, and very gently raised his head.