"What are they waiting for?" queried Mr. Gladsden, impatiently. "Surely not for more reinforcements, when they are already a hundred to one!"
"That's the answer," said the white hunter. "Yon long string of naked copperskins dragging that shining object at their tail."
"A cannon?"
"Yes! Two shots o' that and thar will be a hole in the farmhouse that a herd of buffalo might traverse. Good night to our hidalgo if they get that piece trained on the house. When a bullet hits those grey blocks, hewn out of the volcano pumice stone, it will crumble like glass, and no two ways about it. The casa is a case."
"And can we do nothing, absolutely nothing? Can we not even pierce that multitude, and enter among our friends and die with them."
"Well, I like a gentleman that has boys in the tender leaf still, a-talking of dying anywhar's and so airly yit. Ef you hanker to run the resk o' dying, that's a man's talk, and you can volunteer to come along with me."
"Come along with you, Oliver?"
"Yes. If that cannon fires twice into that house, I tell 'ee, thar'll be nothing but the worst kind of smashed fruit that ever figgered in an old aunty's preserve pots. They may fire her off once, but not twice, if I hev' the right sort of luck in my idee. I think this sport hes gone quite far enough."
By this time Mr. Gladsden had become reconciled to Oliver having "idees."
"I am with you," he simply said, "and the more desperate the enterprise, the better it bids to quiet my blood, which is at boiling point."