“We are friends, Mr. Standish,” cried Henry, “and if you would save your wife and children you must go at once! Open the door! Open, I say!”
The man inside was in a terrible quandary. It was thus that renegades or Indians, speaking the white man's tongue, sometimes bade a door to be opened, in order that they might find an easy path to slaughter. But the voice outside was powerfully insistent, it had the note of truth; his wife and children, roused, too, were crying out, in alarm. Henry knocked again on the door and shouted to him in a voice, always increasing in earnestness, to open and flee. Standish could resist no longer. He took down the bar and flung open the door, springing back, startled at the five figures that stood before him. In the dusk he did not remember Shif'less Sol.
“Mr. Standish,” Henry said, speaking rapidly, “we are, as you can see, white. You will be attacked here by Indians and renegades within half an hour. We know that, because we heard them talking from the bushes. We have a boat in the river; you can reach it in five minutes. Take your wife and children, and pull for Forty Fort.”
Standish was bewildered.
“How do I know that you are not enemies, renegades, yourselves?” he asked.
“If we had been that you'd be a dead man already,” said Shif'less Sol.
It was a grim reply, but it was unanswerable, and Standish recognized the fact. His wife had felt the truth in the tones of the strangers, and was begging him to go. Their children were crying at visions of the tomahawk and scalping knife now so near.
“We'll go,” said Standish. “At any rate, it can't do any harm. We'll get a few things together.”
“Do not wait for anything!” exclaimed Henry. “You haven't a minute to spare! Here are more blankets! Take them and run for the boat! Sol and Jim, see them on board, and then come back!”
Carried away by such fire and earnestness, Standish and his family ran for the boat. Jim and the shiftless one almost threw them on board, thrust a pair of oars into the bands of Standish, another into the hands of his wife, and then told them to pull with all their might for the fort.