They fixed themselves in the building very rapidly, until a great part of the log-house was covered with the blazing arrows.
The logs caught fire, and soon the red and white flames roared, and the blue smoke curled up from the blazing side of the settler’s cabin.
“Now we’re gone,” said Dwight, and his voice was steady with the awful calmness of perfect, hopeless despair. “We have only one chance. Let me see if any of them are at the front.”
He dashed to the front of the little house, and peered out upon the plains.
Several forms, hitherto hidden by the tall prairie grass, were now dancing up and down in savage glee.
“We’re hemmed in,” despairingly said the borderer. “To go out by either door would be to get a bullet, or a dozen of them, through your body. We must stay here as long as we can, and trust for something to turn up to aid us, and if nothing does come, then we’ll die together in the cabin. You and the children had better die than fall into the hands of those brutes yonder.”
His wife threw her arms around his neck, and pressed her pale lips to his.
“I can die with you,” she said.
The children, crying bitterly, crept up to them, and the little clinging hands took hold of their garments.
“Curse these wretches,” gasped Dwight, as he gazed upon his children.