I knew little of detail; faces were blurred, unrecognizable; all I seemed to note clearly was that solid, brutal, heartless, blaspheming line of desperate men sweeping toward us with a relentless fury our puny bullets could not check. Reckless ferocity was in that mad rush; they pressed on more like demons than human beings. I saw men fall; I saw the living stumble over the dead. I heard cries of agony, shouts, curses, but there was no pause. I could mark their faces now, cruel, angry, revengeful; the hands that grasped the veranda railings; the leaping bodies; the rifle-butts uplifted to batter down our frail defences.
As trapped tigers we fought, hurling them back from the windows, slashing, clubbing, striking with fist and steel. Two lay dead across the sill before me, cloven to the very chin, but their bleeding bodies were hurled remorselessly aside, while others clambered forward, mad from lust of blood, crazed with liquor. With clubbed guns we cleared it again and again, battering mercilessly at every head that fronted us. Then a great giant of a fellow--dead or alive I know not--was hurled headlong through the opening, an inert, limp weight, that bore the two soldiers beside me to the floor beneath his body. With wide sweep of my gun I struck him, shattering the stock into fragments, and swung back to meet the others, the hot barrel falling to right and left like a flail. They were through and on me! Wild as any sea-rover of the north I fought, crazed with blood, unconscious of injury, animated solely by desire to strike and slay! Back I had to go; back--I trod on dead bodies, on wounded shrieking in pain, yet no man who came within sweep of that iron bar lived. I loved to hear the thud of it, and I fronted those glaring eyes, my blood afire, my arms like steel. Through the red mist I beheld Caton for an instant as twenty brutal hands uplifted, and then hurled him into the ruck beneath their feet. Whether I fought alone I knew not, cared not. Then some one pressed next to me, facing as I did, wielding a sword like a madman. We had our backs against the piano, our shoulders touched; before us that mob swayed, checked for the moment, held fast by sudden overpowering dread. I glanced aside. My companion was Brennan, hatless, his deep-set eyes aflame, his coat torn off, his shirt ripped open to the waist, his bare breast red with blood.