and worked in the fire-lit dusk for their common defense.  He was wont to watch, lynx-eyed, the spot where these consecrated bullets were placed, and afterward carried them in a separate buckskin bag over his heart, and mentally called them his “kisses;” for the youths of those days were even such fools as now, although in the lapse of time they have come to pose successfully in the dignified guise of the “wise patriots of the pioneer period.”  More than once when the station was attacked and the women loaded the guns of the men to expedite the shooting, she kept stanchly at his elbow throughout the thunderous conflict, and charged and primed the alternate rifles which he fired.[1] Over the trigger, in fact, the fateful word was spoken.

“Oh, Nan,” he exclaimed, looking down at her while taking the weapon from her hand in the vague dusk where she knelt beside him,—­he stood on the shelf that served as banquette to bring him within reach of the loophole, placed so high in the hope that a chance shot entering might range only among the rafters,—­“How quick you are!  How you help me!”

The thunderous crash of the double volley of the settlers firing twice, by the aid of their feminine auxiliaries, to every volley of the Indians, overwhelmed for the moment the tumult of the fiendish whoops in the wild darkness outside, and then the fusillade of the return fire, like leaden hail, rattled against the tough log walls of the station.

“Are you afraid, Nan?” he asked, as he received again the loaded weapon from her hand.

“Afraid?—­No!” exclaimed Peninnah Penelope Anne Mivane—­hardly taller than the ramrod with which she was once more driving the charge home.

He saw her face, delicate and blonde, in the vivid white flare from the rifle as he thrust it through the loophole and fired.  “You think I can take care of you?” he demanded, while the echo died away, and a lull ensued.

“I know you can,” she replied, adjusting with the steady hand of an expert the patching over the muzzle of the discharged weapon in the semi-obscurity.

A blood-curdling shout came from the Cherokees in the woods with a deeper roar of musketry at closer quarters; and a hollow groan within the blockhouse, where there was a sudden commotion in the dim light, told that some bullet had found its billet.

“They are coming to the attack again—­Hand me the rifle—­quick—­quick—­Oh, Nan, how you help me!  How brave you are—­I love you!  I love you!”

“Look out now for a flash in the pan!” Peninnah Penelope Anne merely admonished him.

Being susceptible to superstition and a ponderer on omens, Ralph Emsden often thought fretfully afterward on the double meaning of these words, and sought to displace them in their possible evil influence on his future by some assurance more cheerful and confident.  With this view he often earnestly beset her, but could secure nothing more pleasing than a reference to the will of her grandfather and a protestation to abide by his decision in the matter.