“Have they all gone back?” I asked.
“I think so,” Menzies replied huskily. “They will rush us again directly, and fire the bedding and the wood. It’s all up with us!”
Crack! A gun spoke shrilly from a loophole on the right, and Baptiste’s voice shouted with elation:
“Bonne! bonne! another redskin! He ran out from beneath the window! He is dead now—I shot him in the back!”
“But why did he stay behind the rest?” Menzies asked suspiciously.
“To light the fire!” cried Carteret. “My comrades, it is Heaven’s will that we perish!”
The old voyageur was right. As he spoke he pointed with one band to the loopholes. We saw a red glare spreading farther and farther across the trampled snow crust, and heard a hissing, crackling noise. The dead Indian had ignited the heaped-up material, probably by means of flint and steel.
The flames leaped higher, throwing ruddy reflections yards away. They roared and sang as they devoured the inflammable mattresses, stuffed with straw, and laid hold of the dry timbers piled above. They spat showers of sparks, turned the falling snowflakes to specks of crimson, and drove curls of thick yellow smoke into the room through the chinks of the now burning logs. The house was doomed, and we who were caught there in the meshes of death, fated to perish by agonizing torture, looked at one another with white faces and eyes dilated by horror, with limbs that trembled and lips that could not speak. Outside, across the inclosure, the hordes of savages shrieked and yelled with the voices of malicious demons. From the hall, from the rooms beyond it, the rest of our little band came running in panic to learn the worst and share our misery.
Christopher Burley fell on his knees and clasped his hands in prayer.
“O, God, save us!” he cried. “Let me live to see London again.”