When they got back to the jungle they lay down to rest, and slept there quietly while the daylight lasted, though the Spaniards still sent shots in their direction. As soon as it was dark, they made another furious assault, flinging their fireballs against the palings in order to burst the planks apart. While they were struggling in the ditch, a pirate ran across the gully with his body bent, as is natural to a running man. As he ran, an arrow took him in the back, and pierced him through to the side. He paused a moment, drew the arrow from the wound, wrapped the shaft of it with cotton as a wad, and fired it back over the paling with his musket. The cotton he had used caught fire from the powder, and it chanced that this blazing shaft drove home into a palm thatch. In the hurry and confusion the flame was not noticed, though it spread rapidly across the huts till it reached some powder casks. There was a violent explosion just within the palisadoes, and stones and blazing sticks came rattling down about the Spaniards' ears. The inner castle roared up in a blaze, calling the Spaniards from their guns to quench the fire--no easy task so high above the water. While the guns were deserted, the pirates ran along the bottom of the ditch, thrusting their fireballs under the palisadoes, which now began to burn in many places. As the flames spread, the planking warped, and fell. The outer planks inclined slightly outward, like the futtocks of a ship, so that, when they weakened in the fire, the inner weight of earth broke them through. The pirates now stood back from the fort, in the long black shadows, to avoid the showers of earth--"great heaps of earth"--which were falling down into the ditch. Presently the slope from the bottom of the gully was piled with earth, so that the pirates could rush up to the breaches, and hurl their firepots across the broken woodwork. The San Lorenzo fort was now a spiring red flame of fire--a beacon to the ships at sea. Before midnight the wooden walls were burnt away to charcoal; the inner fort was on fire in many places; yet the Spaniards still held the earthen ramparts, casting down "many flaming pots," and calling on the English dogs to attack them. The pirates lay close in the shadows, picking off the Spaniards as they moved in the red firelight, so that many poor fellows came toppling into the gully from the mounds.