The cannon was in the center of the barricade, loaded with trade balls, fused, and covered with a piece of canvas to protect it from the weather. As Abbott, the Twins, and I ran to it, Pitamakan hurried on to our lodge to rouse my uncle; and the engagés, who had been on watch with the Mandans, quietly slipped round awakening the inmates of the other lodges. I flipped the cover on the cannon, and, just as we got it into the passageway, the fight opened with shots and yells on the west side of the barricade. The thought flashed into my mind that Pitamakan had been right. It had been some of the enemy, lying concealed upon the slope, that our horses had shied from when we were driving them out to graze. "Never mind the racket back there; our job is right here! Now! Swing her round!" Abbott shouted to us, and he had to shout in order to make himself heard. We swung the gun round. I kept hold on the tailpiece while Abbott sighted and called, "To the right a little! Left a trifle! There!" As he lighted the fuse I sprang out of the way of the recoil and for the first time looked ahead. Out of the dusk of the morning, less than a hundred yards away, a horde of warriors were coming toward us swiftly yet with cautious, catlike steps. There was something terribly sinister in their approach, far more so than if they had come with the usual war songs and shouts of an Indian attack. _Boom!_ went the cannon. The flash of it blinded us; the smoke drifted into our faces. Lem, who was carrying our rifles in his arms, shouted to us to take them. "No! Lay 'em down! Help load! Where's the powder for this gun?" Abbott yelled. "Right here!" cried my uncle as he and Tsistsaki and a couple of other women joined us. "Use your rifles!" We snatched them from Lem, and, lo! as the smoke drifted away we could see no one to shoot at, nor could we hear anything but the hollow murmur of the river, as if it were mocking us. "By gum! They've just flew away!" Lem exclaimed. "Not they!" said my uncle, proceeding to thrust a charge powder into the cannon and ram it home. "Just step over to the river-bank and look down, and you'll see them." "Ha! So that's their scheme, is it? Goin' to shut us off from water! I might have knowed it! What beats me is, why didn't they come on? If they had, 't would have been all over with us in about two minutes!" said Lem. "What say they?" Pitamakan asked me, and I told him. The Mandans and the engagés now came to us from the other side of the stockade, with the women and children trailing after them. "The cut-throats ran down over the river-bank," old Lame Wolf signed to my uncle. "Sare, M'sieu' Reynard," Henri Robarre said to him, "hon our side ze cut-throats were but few. Zey holler much, zey fire deir guns no at us. Zey shoot hup at ze stars, an' zen run hide behin' ze bank of ze riv' M'sieu', what hit means, dat strange conducts?"