The good oak was barely quivering under the petulant fury of the stone axe. "But Father, you know so much----" "I? Learning--oh, a key to so many doors! Why, I never found but a few, sniffing at the threshold, a fool, a bumpkin. And Reuben must find learning too." He pulled Ben close, crouching, whispering: "Ben, hear me. I fear for Reuben. I pray you, keep him from being too much wounded. I can't understand him, Ben. Thou art mine own, I _know_ thee--while he--nay, I haven't words...." "But Father, you will----" The pounding ceased. Sudden footsteps thumped rhythmically on snow. Something different smashed against the oak with the gross dullness of the invincible. Goodman Cory pushed his son into the front room. "The devils have found a log. Why, Ben, I shall live if I may." It was an honest door, three-ply, studded with nails; the log ram thundered five times before that barrier yielded. Then Ben's eyes winced at high-crested devil-shadows surging in the orange glare. Goodman Cory wasted no shot on the two who rushed the entrance. The muzzle of his gun found their heads, snake-swift, aimed like the course of a bullet. They collapsed in a mess of legs and arms. With thumping violence a hatchet skidded across the floor. Ben saw his father clamber over the stunned enemy and past the wreckage of oaken boards. He heard his father shout in a voice so searching that all the roaring confusion, magnified with the door down and a sudden cold wind in the gap crying, was momentarily a silence: "Did you come here to murder children?" A French officer ten yards away in the corrupted snow gracefully lifted his flintlock and shot Goodman Cory through the heart. * * * * * He said: "Mother, you must not shield me." But in her prayers she did not hear him. The room before him spread out as a mass of darkness holding two oblong mouths of Hell, yet from moment to moment as his mother prayed, Reuben was aware, coldly aware that those two hell-gates were simply windows of the house where he lived: the west window displaying an absurd, pretty hole--who'd have thought a bullet could go through without shattering all the glass?--the south window a fainter gleaming, for its shutters were partly closed and the glare of the fires came upon it indirectly--beautiful in fact, rather like first light of a red-sky morning; rather like---- Wind struck him, rushing through the ravished door, and Reuben thought: _Now!_ "Mother, let me go! Let me----" but her cheek was heavy and hot against his head; her arms would not understand; he could not hurt her by struggling to free himself. Someone, maybe Father, shouted a dim word or two outside and was answered by a blast of gunfire. In the room behind them Jesse Plum raved. _Mother, let me speak to you_--Reuben understood he had not said it aloud. "_Deliver us from evil--deliver us from evil...._" It was coming.