_If you will_--he had never spoken so to Ben before. Ben groped through the doorway between the rooms; Reuben was shivering there alone. Ben found his mother and Jesse Plum in the hall, Jesse swinging his gaunt arms, one bare, the other trailing a wisp of nightshirt. The old man was fending her off. "Don't impede me, Goody Cory! 'Tis a nothing--leave me fetch my axe!" He lurched clear of her helpless hands, and Ben glimpsed his right side where the nightshirt had been blasted away--cooked meat. A piece of the gun-barrel stuck from a crack in the wall. Jesse seemed unaware of pain. "Let him be, Mother. Come away from the windows!" She heard, understood, came to him. Jesse plunged into the woodshed and returned with his axe dangling. "A nothing!" Jesse hooted. The little blue eyes burned above a mad smile. "I'll hold this side, Goody Cory. They won't pass, not by me. I'll see their guts cheese and the dogs eating it." He raved on. Ben hurried back to his father. "Look!" Only a blot with eyes, at the west window. In wide fluid motion like the final leap of a cat, Joseph Cory swung his gun and fired. The thing toppled away. Below the ridiculous starred hole in the glass a choking body began a gradual dying. "You got him." "I got him," said Joseph Cory, and turned on his son a sickened face Ben had never known. "What of Jesse?" The choking continued. Goodman Cory's voice climbed, beating down that noise: "Speak up, boy!" "His gun did blow, he's hurt but not down. He fetched his axe. I think he knows what he's doing." Goodman Cory reloaded the gun. "Ben, I'm weak." The choking became a bubbling squeal. Goodman Cory stumbled toward the window. Ben's mother was kneeling in the doorway between the rooms, Reuben clutched in her arms, her cheek against his head. She was praying. The light of the fires showed Ben her moving lips, her dark eyes that now and then sought for him, too. Goodman Cory had halted short of the window, crucified by uncertainty, the flintlock a stiff burden. "Ben," he said--"Ben, hear me...." The crash of an axe against the oaken door blotted out at last the clamor of a man strangling in his own blood. But Ben could still hear his mother praying. "A stone axe, not steel," said Joseph Cory, and nodded to Ben as one man to another. "No good against our oak." "Will you shoot through the door?" "... _and forgive us our trespasses_ ..." "Nay--only waste a bullet. Ben, thou art a man--if I'm lost, take care of thy mother and Reuben. Be ready. Readiness--I mean _alway_--later--all thy life--readiness, wherein I've failed." "You've not failed." "No time for kindness." He shook Ben's arm. "Ben--if God liveth he is far away." "... _for thine is the kingdom_ ..." "Ben, hear me," said Goodman Cory. "I say God is far away, no whit concerned with man." "Deliver us," said Adna Cory--"deliver us from evil...." "I wanted learning, Ben. Find more than I did."