At his word three hundred big clumsy hands reached for three hundred bayonets and fixed them to three hundred rifles.
"O'Shea, take O'Toole's squad and stand by up here with the Bannings. O'Shaughnessy, take the left flank. Bill, you take the right. Let's go!"
There wasn't a sound out of the Rifles as they started down the hill, none of their usual croakings and bellowings, just silence and the heavy thud of their feet. The Rumi had seen them. Many of those in the rear of the attack were swinging about to face them. Spring gun bolts began to whiz in their direction. One or two Narakans fell. They were closer to the struggle now, closer to the tightly packed Rumi and the hand to hand struggle about the Sun Maid.
Terrence was firing, throwing lead into the gray-bodied mass ahead of him but his men were just thundering along with their little black eyes fixed on their old oppressors, bayonets leveled in front of them in approved training school method. They resembled nothing so much as a regiment of tanks hurtling at an enemy. The momentum of their charge carried them half way through the Rumi ranks, the terrific force of the plunging amphibians bowling over the lighter catmen.
Bayonets, clubbed rifle and heavy webbed fist fought against claw, teeth and knife. There was almost no firing, almost no sound save for the cries of the Rumi and an occasional cheer from the Terrans.
Terrence emptied his Tommy gun, hurled it in the face of a Rumi and reached for his knife and automatic. A Rumi knocked him off his feet with the butt end of a spring gun but before he could do more, Hannigan stepped over his lieutenant and plunged his bayonet into the catman. The Irishman scrambled to his feet amidst the gray furry bodies, thrust his .45 into a snarling face and pulled the trigger. The face disappeared but another took its place and he fired again. A Rumi with a knife grabbed at him from behind and he raised his pistol again but the cat was already down with a bayonet between his shoulders.
The Greenbacks were yelling now, lifting those great voices of theirs in full throated bullfrog croaks. The Rumi, trapped and desperate, were scattering and trying to flee down river. O'Mara stumbled over a barricade of rocks and boxes and almost got a Terran slug in him before he realized that they had cut their way through to the broken ship. He was up in a minute and urging his men on after the scattering enemy. Twenty or thirty of them tried to make a stand around a tall Rumi officer but O'Shaughnessy at the head of a wedge of Narakans swept into them at a full run.
Their bayonets flashed for a few seconds and then flashed no more, the steel was covered with blood. A few hundred Rumi made it to the river under a hail of fire from O'Shea and his squad on the hill. Hardly pausing to consider their cat-like aversion to water, most of them plunged in and struck out for the other shore. The rest were cut down on the bank by onrushing Greenbacks. Terrence grabbed hold of one of his buglers and then had to practically beat the man over the head to get him to sound Recall.
Bill Fielding picked his way among the bodies and came toward Terrence holding his left arm. O'Shaughnessy was leaping up and down and waving his fist across the river.
"Things different now! All different now! One Greenback better than four, five, eight Rumi!"