Joe's fear and nervousness departed and he knew only a terrible, white-hot anger. This was his house. He had built it with his own hands and now it was threatened. At all costs he must avert that peril. No enemy could enter. Rifle ready, Joe peered through one of the rear windows.
He could see nothing except the mowed swath, the tall grass beyond, and the green trees on top of the hill. It was as though a real bullet had been fired by a ghost. Then the tall grass rippled slightly. Winterson leveled his rifle through another window, shot, and the grass stopped rippling.
"What'd you shoot at?" Joe queried.
"I didn't see any Indian," Winterson assured him, "but you don't see the critters. Still, that grass wasn't moving itself."
"Think you got him?"
"Nah," Winterson said sadly. "I don't think so. We'll—"
"Joe!"
There was cold fear in Emma's voice, and when Joe moved to the front of the house he saw the women looking out. Across the creek and up on the opposite slope, sixteen Indians stood in the meadow. There was something insultingly contemptuous about them as they either leaned on their long rifles or held them in their hands. They were dressed in buckskin save for one who wore a black suit that probably had been plundered from some settler. Of the rest, some wore fringed shirts and some were naked from the waist up. They stood so openly because they were out of rifle range and knew it.
Henry Winterson breathed, "There they are!"
He rested his rifle across a window sill, took an interminable time to sight, and squeezed the trigger. One of the sixteen jerked awkwardly, as though he had stepped on something that slipped beneath his foot, and sat awkwardly down. The rest ran back into the shelter of the woods, and after a moment the wounded man rose to follow. There was a savage satisfaction in Winterson's voice.