"Pour all the fire into those fellows who are coming up with the log!" Mark cried, as half a dozen Abenakis, carrying a heavy tree-trunk, to be used as a battering-ram, made ready to advance at full speed.
This command was obeyed with such good effect that three of the savages fell, and their fellows, dropping the timber, ran to cover with the greatest possible haste.
At the same moment the children fired, the Indians in hiding discharged their weapons, detonations being echoed and reëchoed from mountain to mountain, until it sounded as if a severe engagement was in progress. [7]
"Any one hurt?" Mark cried, and Susan and Luke replied cheerily in the negative. [8]
One of the three Indians wounded while advancing with the tree-trunk succeeded in crawling off to the shelter of the underbrush; but the other two remained where they had fallen.
When, two or three minutes later, an Abenakis darted out from his place of concealment, Mark raised his weapon quickly; but Susan cried, warningly:
"Don't fire! It can do us no harm if they take away the wounded, and it's possible they'll go back to the harbor island, if the injured can be carried off!"
"I'm beginning to think it is you who should be in command here," Mark said, half to himself, as he lowered his weapon. "You've got more sound sense than Luke and I together." Then, raising his voice, he cried, loudly, "Listen, ye Abenakis, whom our fathers have fed when you were hungry, and sheltered when you were cold, but who would murder us now! Take away your wounded, if you are minded to go back to the harbor island, and no one shall harm you while so doing. The white men of Mount Desert have never broken faith with you, nor will we, their children."
Then was done that which proves how much stranger than fiction is truth. The Abenakis, although they had come there to kill or make prisoners the wives and children of those men who had ever been their friends, did not question the faith of the lad when he announced that they might bear off the wounded in safety, but boldly advanced within short range to the aid of their fellows.
"Why do you seek to kill us, who have never done you harm?" Mark cried, when four of the band stood in full view while lifting the wounded from the ground. "Do Indians kill their friends? Do they speak soft words only while the men of the family are at home, being too cowardly to make an attack until the fathers have gone away?"