Short shrift for me if they came through, so in the obstinacy of desperation I set to work to pile old furniture and dry goods against the barricade.

And as they yelled and hammered outside I screamed back defiance from within, sweating, tugging, and hauling with the strength of ten men, piling up the old Martian lumber against the opening till, so fierce was the attack outside, little was left of the original doorway and nothing between me and the besiegers but a rampart of broken woodwork half seen in a smother of smoke and flames.
Still they came on, thrusting spears and javelins through every crevice and my strength began to go.

I threw two tables into a gap, and brained a besieger with a sweetmeat-seller's block and smothered another, and overturned a great chest against my barricade; but what was the purpose of it all?
They were fifty to one and my rampart quaked before them.

The smoke was stifling, and the pains of dissolution in my heart.

They burst in and clambered up the rampart like black ants.