backward stood upright for a moment, swayed, then suddenly, describing a frightful arc of eighty feet in radius, crashed down upon the pavement with its living load more rapidly than a drawbridge when its chain gives way. There was one universal imprecation, then silence, and a few mutilated wretches were seen crawling out from among the heap of dead.
A murmur of mingled agony and resentment succeeded the besiegers’ first shouts of triumph. Quasimodo, leaning on his elbows on the balustrade, regarded them impassively. He might have been one of the old long-haired kings at his window.
Jehan Frollo found himself in a critical position. He was alone on the gallery with the redoubtable bell- ringer, separated from his companions by eighty feet of sheer wall. While Quasimodo was engaged with the ladder, the scholar had run to the postern which he expected to find on the latch. Foiled! The bell- ringer, as he entered the gallery, had locked it behind him. Thereupon Jehan had hidden himself behind one of the stone kings, not daring to breathe, but fixing upon the terrible hunchback a wide-eyed and bewildered gaze, like the man who courted the wife of a menagerie keeper, and going one evening to a rendezvous, scaled the wrong wall and found himself suddenly face to face with the polar bear.
For the first few moments the hunchback did not notice him; but presently he turned his head and straightened himself with a jerk—he had caught sight of the scholar.
Jehan prepared himself for a savage encounter, but his deaf antagonist did not move; only he kept his face turned towards him and regarded him steadily.
“Ho! ho!” said Jehan, “why dost thou glare at me so with that single surly eye?” And so saying, the young scamp began stealthily raising his cross-bow. “Quasimodo!” he cried, “I’m going to change thy nickname. Henceforth they shall call thee the blind bell-ringer.”
He let fly the winged shaft; it whistled and drove into the hunchback’s left arm. Quasimodo was no more disturbed by it than the effigy of King Pharamond by the scratch of a penknife. He took hold of the arrow, drew it out of his arm, and calmly broke it across his powerful knee. Then he dropped rather than threw the two pieces to the ground. But he did not give Jehan time to discharge another shaft. The arrow broken, Quasimodo with a snort leapt like a locust upon the boy, whose armour was flattened by the shock against the wall.
And now, in the half darkness, by the flickering light of the torches, a horrible scene was enacted.
In his left hand Quasimodo grasped both Jehan’s arms, who made no struggle, so utterly did he give himself up for lost; then, with his right, the hunchback proceeded to take off one by one, and with sinister deliberation, the several pieces of the scholar’s iron shell—sword, dagger, helmet, breastplate, armpieces—like a monkey peeling a walnut, and dropped them at his feet.
When Jehan found himself thus disarmed, divested of all shield and covering, naked and helpless in those formidable arms, he did not attempt to parley with his deaf enemy. Instead, he fell to laughing impudently in his face, and with all the careless assurance of a boy of sixteen, burst into a song at that time popular in the streets:
But Marafin has stripped her.”
He had not time to finish. Quasimodo was seen to mount the parapet of the gallery, holding the scholar by the feet in one hand only and swinging him over the abyss like a sling. Then came a sound like a box of bones dashing against a wall, and something came hurtling down that stopped halfway in its descent, caught by one of the projections of the building. It was a dead body bent double, the loins broken, the skull empty.
A cry of horror went up from the truands.