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