"They are coming!" shouted the trader, and taking aim at one of the objects, he fired.
A yell rent the air, followed by a war-whoop from the little band under Black Ear, and they lost no time in seeking the shelter of some brushwood bordering the brook. One had been hit in the shoulder, but the wound was of small consequence.
"Wait up—I don't reckon they're all coming that way!" sang out Tony Jadwin. "They wouldn't be so foolish."
"You're right," answered Henry, who was close at hand, and who understood Indians pretty well since those first fights so many years before.
"Tony, you and Henry can stay at the front of the post," called out James Morris. "I'll see if they mean business, or if it is only a ruse."
There was no time to say more, and a second later Henry and the old hunter found themselves alone, the youth close to the stockade gates, and the old frontiersman at a corner, where two loopholes covered an angle of the palisades.
"I see somebody!" called out the youth, a minute later. "He is sneaking by the big hemlocks."
"Nail him," answered Jadwin, laconically, and a second later his own rifle rang out, and a red man who had shown himself for a moment tottered and fell face downward in the snow. Then Henry fired and a second Indian staggered for a moment and then limped back whence he had come.
The killing of one follower and the wounding of another was not what Rain Cloud had anticipated this early in the attack, and he and the others came to a temporary halt about fifty yards from the stockade gates.
"Wait until Black Ear has drawn them away," he said.