They gave the alarm and every man rushed to the walls. Even the sick and wounded left their beds. Men with the fire of fever in their eyes, men with bandaged limbs and scarce able to crawl, asked for muskets and lined up alongside their yet unscathed comrades. They waited in grim silence, those war-worn soldiers of the Queen. The signal for a furious struggle was given in dramatic fashion. A mine exploded, a large section of the defending wall crumbled into ruins, a hundred guns belched forth a perfect hail of round shot, sharpshooters stationed in the neighboring houses fired their muskets as rapidly as they could lift them from piles of loaded weapons at their command, and, under cover of this fusillade, some three thousand rebels advanced to the attack. They came on with magnificent courage. They actually succeeded in planting scaling-ladders across the breach, and their leader, a fierce-looking cavalry rissaldar, leaped into the ditch and stood there, right in front of the Cawnpore battery, waving a green standard to encourage his followers. He was shot by a man of the 32d, and his body formed the lowermost layer of a causeway of corpses that soon choked the ditch. But the concentrated fire of the defenders checked this most audacious of the many assaults delivered during four hours' fighting. At two o'clock the attack slackened and died away. The rebels had lost some hundreds, while the British had only four men killed and twelve wounded. There was much jubilation among the garrison at this outcome of the long-expected and dreaded attack. It added to their spirit of self-reliance, and it cast down the hopes of the mutineers to a corresponding degree; because their moral inferiority was proved beyond dispute. Like all Asiatics, they had not dared to press on in the face of death. With one whole-hearted rush those three thousand fighters could have swarmed into the Residency against all the efforts of the few Europeans and natives who resisted them. But that rush was never made by the assailants as a mass. Not once in the history of the Mutiny did the sepoys adopt the "do or die" method that characterized the British troops in nearly every action of the campaign. When the moon rose on the night of the 21st a sharp-eyed sentry saw a man creeping across the broken ground in front of the Bailey Guard. He raised his rifle, but his orders were to challenge any one who approached thus secretly, lest, perchance, a messenger from some relieving force might be slain by error. "Who goes there?" he cried. "A friend," was the answer, but the rest of the stranger's words showed that he was a native. The sentry was no linguist. "You _baito_[21] where you are," he commanded, bidding a comrade summon an officer, "or somebody who can talk the lingo." [Footnote 21: "Stop."]