Through the shifting smoke clouds we could see them advancing on a run,—an ugly, motley line, part blue, part gray, part everything,—yelling as they swept forward like a pack of infuriated wolves, their fierce faces scowling savagely behind the rifles. It was half war, half riot—the reckless onslaught of outcasts bent on plunder, inspired by lust, yet guided by rude discipline.
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.
“No shootin', damn ye!” shouted a voice, hoarsely. “No shootin'; I want that Reb alive!”
Through the swirling smoke I recognized the malicious face of Red Lowrie as he pushed his way to the front. To me it was like a personal challenge to combat.
“Rush them!” I muttered into Brennan's ear. “Hurl them back a bit, and then dodge under into the next room.”
I never waited to ascertain if he heard me. With one fierce spring I struck their stunned line, and my iron bar swept a clear space as it crashed remorselessly into them. The next instant Lowrie and I were seemingly alone and fronting each other. A wild cat enraged by pain looks as he did when he leaped to meet me. Hate, deadly, relentless, glared in his eyes, and with a yell of exultation he swung up his long rifle and struck savagely at my head with the stock. I caught it partially on my barrel, breaking its full force, and even as it descended upon my shoulder, jabbed the muzzle hard into his leering face. With a snarl of pain he dropped his gun and grappled with me, but as his fingers closed about my throat, something swirled down through the maze, and the maddened brute staggered back, his arms uplifted, his red beard cloven in twain.
“Now for it, Wayne!” shouted Brennan. “Back with you!”
With a dive I went under the piano. I heard the sliding doors shut behind us, and almost with the sound was again upon my feet.
“To the stairs!” I panted. “Brennan, take the women to the stairs; those fellows are not in the hallway yet, and we can hold them there a while.”