oofs.

{93}

In the gray dawn of the 20th a trumpeter who chanced to be astir, saw a
swarm of men rushing toward the ramparts. He sounded the alarm; but it
was too late. With Spain's battle-cry, "Santiago! Santiago!" (St.
James, her patron saint) the assailants swept over the ramparts and
poured through a breach.

They made quick work. The shriek of a helpless mother or the scream of a
frightened infant was quickly hushed in death. When, however, the first
fury of butchery had spent itself, Menendez ordered that such persons
should be spared, and fifty were actually saved alive. Every male above
the age of fifteen was, from first to last, killed on the spot.

Laudonniere had leaped from his sick-bed and, in his night-shirt, rallied
a few men for resistance. But they were quickly killed or dispersed, and
he escaped to the woods, where a few half-naked fugitives were gathered.
Some of these determined to go back and appeal to the humanity of the
Spaniards. The mercy of wolves to lambs! Seeing these poor wretches
butchered, the others felt that their only hope was in making their way
to the mouth of the river, where lay two or three light craft which
Ribaut had left. {94} Wading through mire and water, their naked limbs
cut by the sedge and their feet by roots, they met two or three small
boats sent to look out for fugitives, and were taken aboard half dead.

After two or three days of vain waiting for the reappearance of the armed
ships, the little flotilla sailed for France, carrying Laudonniere and
the other fugitives, some of whom died on the voyage from wounds and
exposure.

The Spaniards had Fort Caroline, with one hundred and forty-two dead
heretics heaped about it and a splendid booty in armor, clothing, and
provisions--all the supplies lately brought by Ribaut from France.
Everybody has read how Menendez hanged his few prisoners on trees, with
the legend over them, "I do this not as to Frenchmen, but to Lutherans."

Meanwhile Ribaut and his ships had been blown down the coast, vainly
struggling to keep away from the reefs, and were finally wrecked, one
after another, at various distances to the south of St. Augustine.

Let us pass quickly over the remainder of this sickening story. One day,
after Menendez had returned to St. Augustine, Indians came in,
breathless, {95} with tidings that the crew of a wrecked vessel,
struggling northward, had reached an arm of the sea (Matanzas Inlet),
which the