When three hundred desperadoes meet fifty of like caliber in a hand-to-hand conflict--when the three hundred mean to end the business, and the fifty know that they must die--fighting for choice, but die in any event--the resultant encounter will surely be both fierce and brief. And never was fratricidal strife more sanguinary than during the earliest onset within the walls. Each inch of corridor, each plank of the ballroom floor, was contested with insane ferocity. This was not warfare. It savored of the carnage of the jungle. Its sounds were those of wild beasts. It smelled of the shambles. By one of those queer chances which sometimes decide the hazard between life and death, the window nearest that end of the room where the sailors strove to protect a few shrieking women had not been broken in. Here, then, was a tiny bay of refuge; from it the men of the _Andromeda_ and the _Unser Fritz_, Bulmer, Verity, Iris, and such of the Brazilian ladies as had not fled to the upper rooms at the initial volley, looked out on an amazing butchery. De Sylva, no longer young, and never a robust man, had been dragged from mortal peril many times by his devoted adherents. Carmela had snatched a machete from the fingers of a dying soldier, and was fighting like one possessed of a fiend. Once, when a combined rush drove the defenders nearly on top of the non-combatants, Iris would have striven to draw the half-demented girl into the little haven with the other women. But Coke thrust her back, shouting: "Leave 'er alone. She'll set about you if you touch her!" Dickey Bulmer, too, who was displaying a fortitude hardly to be expected in a man of his years and habits, thought that interference was useless. "Let 'er do what she can," he said. "She doesn't know wot is 'appenin' now. If she was on'y watchin' she'd be a ravin' lunatic. God 'elp us all, we've got ourselves into a nice mess!" Somehow, the old man's Lancashire drawl, with its broad vowels and misplaced aspirates, exercised a singularly soothing effect on Iris's tensely-strung nerves. It seemed to remove her from that murder-filled arena. It was redolent of home, of quiet streets, of orderly crowds thronging to the New Brighton sands, of the sober, industrious, God-fearing folk who filled the churches and chapels at each service on a Sunday. These men and women of Brazil were her brothers and sisters in the great comity of nations, yet Heaven knows they did not figure in such guise during that hour of intense emotions.