Jason Brown was thoughtfully whittling down the edge of his ladle. His wife took up her knitting, which dragged on with slow monotony, for she looped each stitch through a blinding mist of tears; but the hired man snapped his waxed ends as if they had been bow-strings, punched his awl furiously through the unyielding leather, and looked out from his bending eye-brows now and then, in vague astonishment that his advice was so blankly received. All at once he paused with both threads half drawn, and listened. "What on 'arth is that?" A sound, as if from the falling of some ponderous object a little distance off, had occasioned this exclamation. Jason Brown and his wife suspended their work in astonishment, and sat gazing at each other. "I will go see," said Brown, closing his knife with a defiant snap. "It don't seem like the stomp of horses." "Hush up!" whispered the hired man. "Set down this minute and look behind you!" Jason had a powerful will of his own and was not to be ordered about by any one, but he turned toward the window which the man was pointing out with his awl and saw it crowded with dusky faces, rendered terrible by great, fiery eyes and stiff, upright plumes, that shot up through the darkness like shafted arrows from a quiver. "Great God, help us, for it is the Indians!" exclaimed Brown, in a hoarse whisper. The woman held her work suspended, as if it had frozen in her hand. The hired servant went on with his stitching, but his sunburned face grew whiter and whiter with each pull of the thread, and the sidelong glances he cast at the window betrayed the keen terror his stolid obstinacy suppressed. "Shall we pitch in, or keep still?" whispered Brown. "Keep still," answered the woman. "Or else God have mercy upon us," muttered the hired man, "for I dare say there is a hundred to one." "Wife, where is my father's gun?" demanded Brown, ashamed of standing helplessly on his own hearth. "Behind the bedroom door, Jason." "Is it loaded?" "With buck shot," answered the hired man. "I loaded it for wild game, but blaze away at them varmints, if you want to, and I'll back you up with the fire shovel. The old woman can pitch in with a flat-iron or rolling-pin. They shan't say that we didn't show grit afore they scalped us, anyhow. Darn 'em!" "Hark! they are gone." True enough, the crowd of faces vanished from the window like shadows, and a confused tread of feet followed, so mellow and soft that it seemed as if the earth throbbed with a faint pulsation. This sound lasted some minutes, and then died away in the whisperings of the forest that crept along the shore close up to the stone homestead.