They had stayed at home on the morning the Beldings were ruined. Ben remembered the explosion of Sabbath quiet into screams and shots, Father snatching the flintlock from its deerhorn rack and Mother gone very white, hurrying himself and four-year-old Reuben up to the garret. Ben was no warrior then--Adna Cory's fantasy developed that later, maybe from Ben's insistence on crowding in front of Reuben because he hoped to see what was going on. For the Beldings help came too late--the mother and three children killed, the father and two other children taken captive to Canada, another child wounded and left for dead. Later Ben watched a soldier carrying in nine-year-old Sam Belding, who had revived and hidden in the swamp. The thin legs dangled; Sam's head rolled against the soldier's jacket, a bloody mess. Sam lived. Ben at six had understood it adequately: we, and the Others. The village could be furious but not astonished. Sam Belding's head became a commonplace, like any pitiable thing seen long enough for the seeing mind to grow its own scar. "Now I think of it," Joseph Cory said, "there may have been Abenaki with the French who raided Schenectady fourteen years ago." He left the table to sit near the fire, long-limbed and rangy, tired from a day at the woodpile and at mending harness. He adjusted a log on the flames and yawned, smiling at his cavernous noise, rubbing his palms up over his forehead; a clean and sober man, still young. Ben grew bemused with a fancy that his father's face had become translucent to some other fire behind the hawk-nosed profile, untidy sandy hair, pointed chin, friendly thin mouth, speculative gray eyes. "Those poor fools at Schenectady! That you don't remember, Ben. The meeting voted our palisade as soon as word came from Schenectady--early March, you but a few weeks old. I was an angry man that year as well as proud." His glance at his wife invited sharing of other memories; Adna Cory lifted a dark eyebrow and blushed a little, not quite smiling. "We all labored beyond ourselves to build that stockade, Ben, chopping frozen ground. Had cause--they were caught asleep at Schenectady, those Dutchmen. Men at Albany warned 'em of danger, but they were carrying on some factional quarrel with the people at Albany, and to show how lightly they held any word from that source they put up snowman sentinels. Marry come up!--and went to bed, so the Inj'ans and French walked in through the open gates. Snowmen! They that were butchered in bed were the fortunate. I'll never understand my fellow men. Babes and women cut open and burned alive...." The Abenaki, Ben knew, had not changed. Climbing out there with Reuben the other day, he had seen the snow, high and hard-crusted against the stockade walls. Beyond the window clouds would be still rushing in their silence. Ben heard his mother saying in distress: "So long ago, Joseph! Let it be."