“Get away till I light a candle,” said Silence. She fairly pushed her aunt off, shovelled the ashes from the coals in the fireplace, and lighted a candle. Then she threw some wood on the smouldering fire. Her aunt was running around the room screaming. There came a great pound on the door. “It’s the Indians! it’s the Indians! don’t let ’em in!” shrieked her aunt. “Don’t let them in! don’t let them!” She placed her lean shoulder in her white bed-gown against the door. “Go away! go away!” she yelled. “You can’t come in! O Lord Almighty, save us!” “You stand off,” said Silence. She took hold of her aunt’s shoulders. “Be quiet,” she commanded. Then she called out, in a firm voice, “Who is there?” At the shout in response she drew the great iron bolts quickly and flung open the heavy nail-studded door. There was a press of frantic, white-faced people into the room; then the door was slammed to and the bolts shot. It was very still in the room, except for the shuffling rush of the men’s feet, and now and then a stern, gasping order. The children did not cry; all the noise was without. The house might have stood in the midst of some awful wilderness peopled with fiendish beasts, from the noise without. The cries seemed actually in the room. The children’s eyes glared white over their mothers’ shoulders. The men hurriedly strengthened the window-shutters with props of logs, and fitted the muskets into the loop-holes. Suddenly there was a great crash at the door, and a wilder yell outside. The muskets opened fire, and some of the women rushed to the door and pressed fiercely against it with their delicate shoulders, their white, desperate faces turning back dumbly, like a spiritual phalanx of defence. Silence and her aunt were among them. Suddenly Widow Eunice Bishop, at a fresh onslaught upon the door, and a fiercer yell, lifted up her voice and shrieked back in a rage as mad as theirs. Her speech, too, was almost inarticulate, and the sense of it lost in a savage frenzy; her tongue stuttered over abusive epithets; but for a second she prevailed over the terrible chorus without. It was like the solo of a fury. Then louder yells drowned her out; the muskets cracked faster; the men rammed in the charges; the savages fell back somewhat; the blows on the door ceased. Silence ran up the stairs to her chamber, and peeped cautiously out of a little dormer-window. Deerfield village was roaring with flames, the sky and snow were red, and leaping through the glare came the painted savages, a savage white face and the waving sword of a French officer in their midst. The awful warwhoops and the death-cries of her friends and neighbors sounded in her ears. She saw, close under her window, the dark sweep of the tomahawk, the quick glance of the scalping-knife, and the red starting of caps of blood. She saw infants dashed through the air, and the backward-straining forms of shrieking women dragged down the street; but she saw not David Walcott anywhere.