Dense volumes of swirling red smoke, in which danced ghostly jets of blue flame, rolled about the habitation of the robber band, and penetrated to its interior. It broke out of the windows in long spirals and tongues, forked as those of adders. The rocks up the Vézère were visible, glaring orange, every tree was lit up, and its trunk turned to gold. The Vézère glowed a river of flame; clouds that had vanished gathered, crowding to see the spectacle, and palpitated above it. "Forward!" yelled Ogier, and the whole party rushed up the steep ascent. For one reason it would have been better had they crept up the steep slope before the horn was blown, so as to be ready at once to burst the gates and occupy every avenue. But Ogier had considered this course, and had deemed the risk greater than the advantage. To climb the rubble slope without displacing the shale was impossible; to do so without making sufficient noise to alarm the sentinel was hardly feasible in such a still night. This might have been done in blustering wind and lashing rain, not on such a night as that when the bullfrog's call rang down the valley and was answered by another frog a mile distant. The ascent was arduous; it could not have been made easily in pitch darkness; now it was effected rapidly by the glare of the cataract of falling fire and of blazing rafters. In ten minutes, with faces streaming, with lungs blowing, the peasants reached the gate-house. They beat at it with stones, with their fists; they drove their pikes at it, but could not open it. Then a man--it was one of those who had been taken and confined in the castle--bid all stand back. He buckled on to his feet a sort of spiked shoe, with three prongs in each sole, and held a crooked axe in his hand. "I have not been in there for nothing," laughed he. "I saw what they had for climbing walls, and I've made the like at my forge." Then he went to the wall, drove in the end of his pick, and in a moment, like a cat, went up from stone course to stone course, till he reached the summit of the wall, when he threw aside his foot-grapnels and leaped within. In the panic caused by the sudden avalanche of stones and fire the sentinel had deserted the gate. The oak doors were cast open, and the whole body of armed men burst in. They found the small garrison huddled together, paralysed with fear, all their daring, their insolence, their readiness on an occasion gone. They stood like sheep, unable to defend themselves, and were taken without offering any resistance. The surprise was so complete, the awfulness of the manner in which they were visited was so overwhelming, that the ruffians did not know whether they were not called to their final account, and whether their assailants were not fiends from the flaming abyss. It had come on them in the midst of sleep when stupefied with drink.