A dead baby lay directly in the path, and a woman caught it up, and tried to warm it at her breast. She wrapped her cloak around it, and wiped its little bloody face with her apron. “’Tis not dead,” she declared, frantically; “the child is not dead!” She had not shed a tear nor uttered a wail before, but now she began sobbing aloud over the dead child. It was Goodwife Barnard’s, and no kin to her; she was a single woman. The others were looking right and left for lurking savages; she looked only at the little cold face on her bosom. “The child breathes,” she said, and hurried on faster that she might get succor for it. The party halted before Ensign John Sheldon’s house. The stout door was fast, but there was a hole in it, as if hacked by a tomahawk. The men tried it and shook it. “Open, open, Goodwife Sheldon!” they hallooed. “Friends! friends! Open the door!” But there was no response. Silence Hoit left the throng at the door, and began clambering up on a slant of icy snow to a window which was flung wide open. The window-sill was stained with blood, and so was the snow. One of the men caught Silence and tried to hold her back. “There may be Indians in there,” he whispered, hoarsely. But Silence broke away from him, and was in through the window, and the men followed her, and unbolted the door for the women, who pressed in wildly, and flung it to again. A child who was among them, little Comfort Arms, stationed herself directly with her tiny back against the door, with her mouth set like a soldier’s, and her blue eyes gleaming fierce under her flaxen locks. “They shall not get in,” said she. Somehow she had gotten hold of a great horse-pistol, which she carried like a doll. Nobody heeded her, Silence least of all. She stared about the room, with her lips parted. Right before her on the hearth lay a little three-year-old girl, Mercy Sheldon, her pretty head in a pool of blood, but Silence cast only an indifferent glance when the others gathered about her, groaning and sighing. Suddenly Silence sprang towards a dark heap near the pantry door, but it was only a woman’s quilted petticoat. The spinning-wheel lay broken on the floor, and all the simple furniture was strewn about wildly. Silence went into Goodwife Sheldon’s bedroom, and the others followed her, trembling, all except little Comfort Arms, who stood unflinchingly with her back pressed against the door, and the single woman, Grace Mather; she stayed behind, and put wood on the fire, after she had picked up the quilted petticoat, and laid the dead baby tenderly wrapped in it on the settle. Then she pulled the settle forward before the fire, and knelt before it, and fell to chafing the little limbs of the dead baby, weeping as she did so.