She eyed in an agony some dark bodies lying like logs in the snow. A wild impulse seized her to run out, turn their dead faces, and see that none of them was her lover’s. Her room was full of red light; everything in it showed distinctly. The roof of the next house crashed in, and the sparks and cinders shot up like a volcano. There was a great outcry of terror from below, and Silence hurried down. The Indians were trying to fire the house from the west side. They had piled a bank of brush against it, and the men had hacked new loop-holes and were beating them back. John Carson’s wife clutched Silence as she entered the keeping-room. “They are trying to set the house on fire,” she gasped, “and--the bullets are giving out!” The woman held a little child hugged close to her breast; she strained him closer. “They shall not have him, anyway,” she said. Her mouth looked white and stiff. “Put him down and help, then,” said Silence. She began pulling the pewter plates off the dresser. “What be you doing with my pewter plates?” screamed her aunt at her elbow. Silence said nothing. She went on piling the plates under her arm. “Think you I will have the pewter plates I have had ever since I was wed, melted to make bullets for those limbs of Satan?” Silence carried the plates to the fire; the women piled on wood and made it hotter. John Carson’s wife laid her baby on the settle and helped, and Widow Bishop brought out her pewter spoons, and her silver cream-jug when the pewter ran low, and finally her dead husband’s knee-buckles from the cedar chest. All the pewter and silver in Widow Eunice Bishop’s house were melted down that night. The women worked with desperate zeal to supply the men with bullets, and just before the ammunition failed, the Indians left Deerfield village, with their captives in their train. The men had stopped firing at last. Everything was quiet outside, except for the flurry of musket-shots down on the meadow, where the skirmish was going on between the Hatfield men and the retreating French and Indians. The dawn was breaking, but not a shutter had been stirred in the Bishop house; the inmates were clustered together, their ears straining for another outburst of slaughter. Suddenly there was a strange crackling sound overhead; a puff of hot smoke came into the room from the stairway. The roof had caught fire from the shower of sparks, and the stanch house that had withstood all the fury of the savages was going the way of its neighbors. The men rushed up the stair, and fell back. “We can’t save it!” Captain Isaac Moulton said, hoarsely. He was an old man, and his white hair tossed wildly around his powder-blackened face. Widow Eunice Bishop scuttled into her bedroom, and got her best silk hood and her giltframed looking-glass. “Silence, get out the feather-bed!” she shrieked.