“Take my arm, boy,” he said, as he helped me toward the window, and I climbed in by it, when the first thing my eyes lighted upon was the figure of our Sarah, down on her knees behind the door with her eyes shut; but a gun was leaning up against the wall; and as she heard us she sprang up, seized it, and faced round.
“Oh! I thought it was the Indians,” she said, with a sigh of relief.
“Perhaps we have been frightening ourselves without cause,” said my father, helping Morgan to fix up the strong shutter with which the window was provided. “The Indians are gone now.”
“Yes,” muttered Morgan, so that I could hear, “but they may come back again. I don’t trust ’em a bit.”
“Nor I, Morgan,” said my father, for he had heard every word; “but a bold calm front seems to have kept them from attempting violence. If we had been shut up here, and had opened fire, not one of us would now have been alive.”
“Never mind, sir,” said Morgan. “If they come back let’s risk it, and show a bold front here behind the shutters, with the muzzles of our guns sticking out, for I couldn’t go through another hour like that again. I was beginning to turn giddy, like Master George here, and to feel as if my head was going to burst.”
“Go up into the roof, and keep a good look-out from the little gratings; but keep away, so as not to show your face.”
“Then you do think they’ll come back, sir?”
“Yes, I feel sure of it. I am even now in doubt as to whether they are all gone. Indians are strangely furtive people, and I fully expect that a couple of them are lying down among the trees to watch us, for fear we should try to communicate with the others. I am afraid now that I made a mistake in settling down so far from the rest. Ah! Listen! A shot. Yes; there it is again.”
“No, sir,” said Morgan, “that wasn’t a shot: it was—there it goes again!—and another.”