"I beg your pardon for waking you," said Jolly Roger, "but I am just down from the north, hoping to find my friends back here and I have seen nothing but destruction and death. You are the first living soul I have found to ask about them."
"Where were they?" grunted the man.
"At Cragg's Ridge."
"Then God help them," came the woman's voice from back in the room.
"Cragg's Ridge," said the man, "was a burning hell in the middle of the night."
Jolly Roger's fingers dug into the wood at the edge of the door.
"You mean—"
"A lot of 'em died," said the man stolidly, as if eager to rid himself of the one who had broken his sleep. "If it was Mooney, he's dead. An' if it was Robson, or Jake the Swede, or the Adams family—they're dead, too."
"But it wasn't," said Jolly Roger, his heart choking between fear and hope. "It was Father John, the Missioner, and Nada Hawkins, who lived with him—or with her foster-mother in the Hawkins' cabin."
The man shook his head, and turned down the wick of his lamp.