Forgotten now was the edict that one party should stay on one side of the hut, the other on the opposite side. Forgotten, even, was the bag of stones in Gleazen's pack. Armed with every weapon that the hut afforded, we stood behind door and window and saw a sight that appalled the bravest of us.
Straight up the hill from the spring where they had killed Seth Upham there streamed a raging black horde. The rising moon shone on their spears and revealed the endless multitudes that came hard at the heels of the leaders. Their yells reverberated from wall to wall of the forest and even, it seemed to us, to the starry sky above them.
As we fired on them, the streamers of flame from our guns darted into the night and the acrid smoke drifted back to us. But though they faltered, this time they came doggedly on. Already in the moonlight we could distinguish individuals; now we could see their contorted features alive with rage and vindictiveness. That they would take the hut by storm, there was not the slightest doubt; nor was there a ray of hope that we should survive its fall.
It was a long, long way from Topham to that wattled hut in a clearing on the side of an African hill, and in more ways than one it was a far call from Higgleby's barn. But it was Higgleby's barn that I thought of then—Higgleby's barn in the pasture, with a light shining through a crack between the boards, and a boy scaling the wall under the window; Higgleby's barn in the dark, with tongues of flame running out from it through the grass. Truly, I thought in metaphor, which was rare for me, the fire that sprang up so long ago in Higgleby's barn had already killed Seth Upham, and now it was going to enfold and engulf us all.
Then I thought of the mission on the river, and the girl whom I had seen first among the mangroves, then in the darkness on the mission porch. Did the war actually reach to the coast? And would the war wipe out "old Parmenter" as Gleazen had said? By heaven, I thought, it would not and it should not!
All this, of course, takes far longer to tell, than it took to go coursing through my mind. In the time it took to think it out, not one black foot struck the ground; not one left the ground. Before that racing army of negroes had advanced another step, the answer had come to me; and now, no longer the boy who had climbed in idle curiosity the wall of Higgleby's barn, but a man to think and act, I cried from my dry throat:—
"Out of the back window, men! O'Hara, help me brace the door! Out of the window and over the hill!"
With an oath Gleazen cried, "He's right! They're all coming on us up the hill! The back way's our only chance!"
O'Hara, in spite of my call for help, led the way out of the back window; but Arnold paused to jam chairs and boards against the door; and Gleazen, ever reckless, stooped in the darkness and picked something up. As we sprang to the window, he came last of all, and I saw that he, the only one to think of it in that hour of desperate peril, was of a mind to bring his pack—the pack that had held the thing for which we had left our homes and crossed the seas. I saw Matterson clinging to brave Abe Guptil's shoulder, and striving desperately, with Abe's help, to keep pace with O'Hara, who in all this time had not got so much as a scratch. I saw the forest wherein lay our sole hope of safety, and terribly far off it seemed. Then I rolled out into the moonlight, and ran as if the devil were at my heels.