“Give me a boost up, Hardy,” cried Kenton, standing with his face to the building and arms uplifted. Instead, Hardy took a flying leap upon his friend’s back and grasped the eaves of the cabin.
“Come off that!” shouted Kenton, trying to seize Hardy by the leg, but the youngster wriggled out of reach and gained a footing on the roof.
“How’s that for impudence, Captain?” said Kenton to Boone, who was now beside him. “Order him down, won’t you?”
“I’m all right, Dad! Hurry up the buckets!” shouted Hardy.
Boone loved the lad more than he had realized until he saw him in his present extremely perilous position. For an instant Boone hesitated, but only for an instant, before he answered the scout:
“Let him be, Kenton. He’s playing a man’s part and we haven’t the right to baulk him. Not water!” he cried to the women, who now arrived with several buckets of the fluid. “Not water! We shall need every drop we have. We must make sand serve, if it will. Hurry with some empty buckets.”
In the meanwhile, Hardy had sense enough not to expose himself unnecessarily but lay prone along the edge of the roof. In a few minutes half a dozen women were digging energetically in the sandy soil of the square and filling the buckets, which Boone and Kenton handed up to Hardy. The lad was now obliged to stand, and [immediately his form], clearly outlined in the lurid light, [became the target] for a hundred rifles. A frontiersman would have brought him down in a minute, and although the Indians were poor shots, it was a miracle that he lived through the fusillade that they directed against him. At one time he felt a sudden stinging sensation in his right thigh and looked down to see if an ember had burned through his leggings. A little later, a hot iron seemed to sear his cheek, and when he put his hand to the place it came away covered with blood.
In hardly more than five minutes after the buckets began to come up Hardy had the fire out, and, shouting a warning to those below, dropped upon his stomach and slid off the roof into the arms of Kenton.
“That was well done, son,—very well done,” said Boone. “Now back to your post. The Injuns will draw off at daybreak, but they may come strong once again before that.”