We gathered there behind our lumber-and-furniture barricade, six against an army. We did not say anything coherent, I believe, but continually shouting encouraging noises to one another, we fired and fired until our weapons grew hot to the touch. The beasts were thronging the hall below us, converging on the stairs and tearing at the mass of impeding obstacles which the Colonel and John had strewn down the length of the steps that morning. It was at once a hideous and a thrilling sight. The monsters were swarming up at us, a foot at a time, clawing at planks and barrels and broken chairs, hurling them back onto their comrades' heads; none of them seemed to be firing at us, though in the heat of battle I may not have noticed if they had. It looked to me as if they were too infuriated to bother with guns. Like so many enraged baboons, they wanted to get at us and tear us to bloody tatters with their hands and teeth alone. As they fought upward, those in the fore exploded soundlessly, horribly, and quickly, like multicolored bags of gaudy rubber stabbed with sharp knives, leaving their dead robots to roll and flounder to the bottom again. I had run out of ammo for the big gun; howling with a kind of mad glee, I blazed away into the thick of them with my twin Colts, putting my bullets into the dark human forms within the hybrid monsters. The castle rocked and echoed with the fury of the fight. Cordite and spilt blood reeked in my nostrils. One of the devils, a rhinocerous-brute with a towering ivory-tinted "horn" that wobbled as he moved, came scrambling on all fours up over the mess of wreckage toward us; I took him for my very own, waiting until he was within a yard of me and then presenting both my revolvers to his face and pulling the triggers. My guns were empty! * * * * * Before I could recover from my surprise, he had gathered himself--he must have been an especially athletic fellow--and leaped straight for me. I went down under his weight, flailing my arms wildly. I was unprepared for a scuffle and for a few seconds could do nothing to defend myself properly. Before I had rallied, the body of the creature went limp and sagged down onto me, while his true form flickered away into nothingness. I struggled out from under him to see old Johnson pulling back a bloodied pig-sticker. He grinned at me complacently. "Still a trace of the old skill left, Mister Chester!" They were the last words he ever spoke. A volley crashed out below us, and he swayed and fell at full length, like an ancient tree cut at the roots. I knelt over him, and saw that he was dead.