He was about to speak, to assure her there was no danger that Graham’s men would fire upon the cabin—­when hell broke suddenly loose out in the night.  The savage roar of guns answered Sokwenna’s fusillade, and a hail of bullets crashed against the log walls.  Two of them found their way through the windows like hissing serpents, and with a single movement Alan was at Mary’s side and had crumpled her down on the floor beside Keok and Nawadlook.  His face was white, his brain a furnace of sudden, consuming fire.

“I thought they wouldn’t shoot at women,” he said, and his voice was terrifying in its strange hardness.  “I was mistaken.  And I am sure—­now—­that I understand.”

With his rifle he cautiously approached the window.  He was no longer guessing at an elusive truth.  He knew what Graham was thinking, what he was planning, what he intended to do, and the thing was appalling.  Both he and Rossland knew there would be some way of sheltering Mary Standish in Sokwenna’s cabin; they were accepting a desperate gamble, believing that Alan Holt would find a safe place for her, while he fought until he fell.  It was the finesse of clever scheming, nothing less than murder, and he, by this combination of circumstances and plot, was the victim marked for death.

The shooting had stopped, and the silence that followed it held a significance for Alan.  They were giving him an allotted time in which to care for those under his protection.  A trap-door was in the floor of Sokwenna’s cabin.  It opened into a small storeroom and cellar, which in turn possessed an air vent leading to the outside, overlooking the ravine.  In the candle-glow Alan saw the door of this trap propped open with a stick.  Sokwenna, too, was clever.  Sokwenna had foreseen.

Crouched under the window, he looked at the girls.  Keok, with a rifle in her hand, had crept to the foot of the ladder leading up to the attic, and began to climb it.  She was going to Sokwenna, to load for him.  Alan pointed to the open trap.

“Quick, get into that!” he cried.  “It is the only safe place.  You can load there and hand out the guns.”

Mary Standish looked at him steadily, but did not move.  She was clutching a rifle in her hands.  And Nawadlook did not move.  But Keok climbed steadily and disappeared in the darkness above.

“Go into the cellar!” commanded Alan.  “Good God, if you don’t—­”

A smile lit up Mary’s face.  In that hour of deadly peril it was like a ray of glorious light leading the way through blackness, a smile sweet and gentle and unafraid; and slowly she crept toward Alan, dragging the rifle in one hand and holding the little pistol in the other, and from his feet she still smiled up at him through the dishevelment of her shining hair, and in a quiet, little voice that thrilled him, she said, “I am going to help you fight.”

Nawadlook came creeping after her, dragging another rifle and bearing an apron heavy with the weight of cartridges.