“If you don’t stay there, I’ll open the door and go outside to fight!  Do you understand? Stay there!”

His clenched fist was in their faces, his voice almost a shout.  He saw another white spurt of dust; the bullet crashed in tinware, and following the crash came a shriek from Keok in the attic.

In that upper gloom Sokwenna’s gun had fallen with a clatter.  The old warrior bent himself over, nearly double, and with his two withered hands was clutching his stomach.  He was on his knees, and his breath suddenly came in a panting, gasping cry.  Then he straightened slowly and said something reassuring to Keok, and faced the window again with the gun which she had loaded for him.

The scream had scarcely gone from Keok’s lips when Alan was at the top of the ladder, calling her.  She came to him through the stark blackness of the room, sobbing that Sokwenna was hit; and Alan reached out and seized her, and dragged her down, and placed her with Nawadlook and Mary Standish.

From them he turned to the window, and his soul cried out madly for the power to see, to kill, to avenge.  As if in answer to this prayer for light and vision he saw his cabin strangely illumined; dancing, yellow radiance silhouetted the windows, and a stream of it billowed out through an open door into the night.  It was so bright he could see the rain-mist, scarcely heavier than a dense, slowly descending fog, a wet blanket of vapor moistening the earth.  His heart jumped as with each second the blaze of light increased.  They had set fire to his cabin.  They were no longer white men, but savages.

He was terribly cool, even as his heart throbbed so violently.  He watched with the eyes of a deadly hunter, wide-open over his rifle-barrel.  Sokwenna was still.  Probably he was dead.  Keok was sobbing in the cellar-pit.  Then he saw a shape growing in the illumination, three or four of them, moving, alive.  He waited until they were clearer, and he knew what they were thinking—­that the bullet-riddled cabin had lost its power to fight.  He prayed God it was Graham he was aiming at, and fired.  The figure went down, sank into the earth as a dead man falls.  Steadily he fired at the others—­one, two, three, four—­and two out of the four he hit, and the exultant thought flashed upon him that it was good shooting under the circumstances.

He sprang back for another gun, and it was Mary who was waiting for him, head and shoulders out of the cellar-pit, the rifle in her hands.  She was sobbing as she looked straight at him, yet without moisture or tears in her eyes.

“Keep down!” he warned.  “Keep down below the floor!”