ball passed far overhead. Brian
stood on a demi-bastion that half flanked the gates, and after firing
his pistol into the men below, he leaped down the steps into the
courtyard and joined Turlough behind the falcons.

"One at a time, Turlough. They'll have the gates down in a minute."

While he waited for the storm to fall, Brian saw that two or three of
his men had been hit. He wondered dully that the Dark Master had not
made a general assault, and concluded that he must wish to save men. It
was a long moment that dragged down on him; then a splash of light burst
up, the gates were driven inward and shattered, and with a great roar
there fell a rain of riven beams and stones and dirt.

Sheltering in the hall doorway, Brian and Turlough stayed unmoving
through an instant of black silence. Out of it broke a wild Scots yell,
and in the light of the courtyard cressets a wave of men surged up in
the breach. Brian's linstock fell on a falcon, and the little gun barked
a hail of bullets across the Scots; Turlough's gun followed suit, and
the first lines of men went down in a struggling mass.

The Dark Master was not to be beaten this time, however. Another wave of
Scots swept up, with a mass of men behind them. While some of Brian's
men tried to get the two falcons reloaded, a storm of bullets swept
across the courtyard, and Brian saw Turlough turn and run for it through
the doorway, while two of the men fell over a falcon.

But as the first line of men broke into the courtyard, Brian fired the
remaining three cannon as fast as he could touch linstock to powder. The
bullet-hail tore the front ranks to shreds, but through the darkling
smoke-cloud he saw other men come leaping, and knew that the game was
up.

On the next instant his men had closed around him, muskets were stabbing
the powder-smoke, and Brian fell to work with his Spanish blade.
O'Donnells and Scots together heaved up against them, but Brian's point
weaved out between cutlas and claymore and bit out men's lives until
the mass of men surged back again like the backleash of a wave that
comes against a wall.

Brian heard the Dark Master's voice from somewhere, and with that
muskets spat from the gloom and bullets thudded around him. One slapped
his steel cap away and another nicked his ear, and a third came so close
across his eyes that he felt the hot breath of it; but his men fared in
worse case than that, for they were clutching and reeling and fallen,
a