"Arm!"
That noise was part of the dream. In the dream, faceless beings had been shouting, not willing that Ben should fly.
Then he knew the cry was the summons of the watch in a world of no dreaming—a few rods away, near the north end of the palisade. It flared, a jet of terror in darkness, and died.
The covers dropped. Cold slapped and squeezed Ben, but he could not move until some sound released him from this frozen waiting.
It came, a yelling that soared upward like fire swallowing dry pine, throbbing yells made by only one kind of creature alive.
A different voice pierced the clamor, snarling in search of authority: "À droit, vous! Là-bas! Enfoncez les portes!" And a wild drawled afterthought: "Prisonniers!" The voice was smothered by the yells and a whinnying of some other man's laughter.
Footsteps pounded on snow. Steel assaulted wood. Then—Reuben still sleeping—the flintlocks began to talk, the near ones a dry thundering, the farther ones like slamming doors.
Ben could move. He reeled up, shocked into panic, thrashing against sullen-clinging bedclothes. "Ru!" Ben punched and shook him. "God damn it, wake up!" Reuben made an empty noise. "Raid! It's the French!" Reuben leaped under his hand, comprehending. "Here!—your britches. Your shoes—no, bugger it, these're mine, where'd you put yours?" Ben slammed his forehead on the foot of the bed, searching; his nightshirt tripped him and he flung it off. A floor-splinter lanced fire into his knee. He heard two thuds, one below the window, the other in the same instant on the opposite wall. "Ru!"
"Leave off shouting, Ben."
"That bullet——"
"What bullet?"
"Never mind. Will you tell me where your shoes are?"
Reuben could not answer. Joseph Cory's voice fumed at the foot of the stairs: "Come down! Coats—don't forget your coats!"
Ben shouted: "We're coming!" He pursued the shoes under the fallen bed-cover. He found his own breeches and shirt, then his hunting-knife where it always rested on the table by the bed.
Orange glory beyond the window marvelously bloomed, flooding Reuben's angelic face and thin naked body moving toward the square of light. "Why," said Reuben—"why, the cods're burning us!"
"God's mercy, get away from that window!"
He had to pull Reuben from it; force the shoes on his feet and find armholes for him. Father was calling again. Ben hustled his brother to the head of the stairs. "Stay here. I'll get the coats."
The room shimmered. Red-black ghosts in a swirling jig hid the coats, defying Ben to come get them and fall on his face. He got them; then he too was drawn against his will to the window.
The fire danced on his left, the heart of it out of sight—west and south, beyond the training field, the Hawks house perhaps. North, near the meeting-house, a confusion of shapes under gunfire was twisting toward some climax. Five fire-tinted men broke away, soundless to Ben, moving with apparent slowness. One leaped forward in mid-stride to drop in the white; his arms sought each other above his head, scooping the snow as if he would embrace it, or climb like a hurt bug up the side of a world for him overturned.
The others disregarded him, plunging toward the Cory house. Reuben was trying to speak. "I'm here, Ru. We must go down—could be trapped." Reuben mumbled something. "What?"
"Ben, I must——"
"God damn it, don't be looking for the pot, use the floor, if they burn us who's to care?" Ben called again to his father, but his voice was swallowed by a bang. Not his father's gun—Jesse Plum's musket, a piece of trash the old man had picked up at third or fourth hand, likely to shoot anywhere but forward. "Come on, Ru!"
"I'm sorry."
"Your coat. Here—I'll button it for you."
"Ben, I didn't pray tonight, nor I didn't forget neither."
"What? Oh, put on your coat!"
"I didn't pray."
Ben forced the boy's arms into the coat and lifted him, amazed at his own strength, at the sureness of his feet on invisible stair-treads. "Ru, you deceive yourself."
"Mr. Williams saith that without prayer——"
"Ru, be still!"
Jesse's wretched gun slammed again, a different sound, a spattering clang, followed by the stridency of Jesse cursing and weeping.
Ben's mouth brushed Reuben's cheek; he tried to say something reassuring. How could even a child suppose the disaster was on his account? What of all those in Deerfield who did pray? He supposed Reuben would presently recover his wits, and set him down, but held him still in the hollow of his arm.
No true dark prevailed here in the entry facing south. The front room's west window admitted the glare of the burning, showing the empty four-poster. Ben's father was a specter in a nightshirt, cursing himself for not having locked the shutters. "Where's Mother?"
"In the hall." That was the name for the rear room, kitchen-parlor-workroom, heart of the little house. "Go to her, Reuben." Ben let him go. The brass face of the clock blurred in its tall oaken cabinet; Ben could not make it out. His time-sense said it was near dawn.
Outside the front door voices set up a gobbling not in French. Joseph Cory yelled: "I hear you, God damn you!" And to Ben, quietly: "See to Jesse, I think his gun blowed. Find out if you will."
If you will—he had never spoken so to Ben before. Ben groped through the doorway between the rooms; Reuben was shivering there alone. Ben found his mother and Jesse Plum in the hall, Jesse swinging his gaunt arms, one bare, the other trailing a wisp of nightshirt. The old man was fending her off. "Don't impede me, Goody Cory! 'Tis a nothing—leave me fetch my axe!" He lurched clear of her helpless hands, and Ben glimpsed his right side where the nightshirt had been blasted away—cooked meat. A piece of the gun-barrel stuck from a crack in the wall. Jesse seemed unaware of pain.
"Let him be, Mother. Come away from the windows!" She heard, understood, came to him. Jesse plunged into the woodshed and returned with his axe dangling.
"A nothing!" Jesse hooted. The little blue eyes burned above a mad smile. "I'll hold this side, Goody Cory. They won't pass, not by me. I'll see their guts cheese and the dogs eating it." He raved on. Ben hurried back to his father.
"Look!"
Only a blot with eyes, at the west window. In wide fluid motion like the final leap of a cat, Joseph Cory swung his gun and fired. The thing toppled away. Below the ridiculous starred hole in the glass a choking body began a gradual dying.
"You got him."
"I got him," said Joseph Cory, and turned on his son a sickened face Ben had never known. "What of Jesse?" The choking continued. Goodman Cory's voice climbed, beating down that noise: "Speak up, boy!"
"His gun did blow, he's hurt but not down. He fetched his axe. I think he knows what he's doing."
Goodman Cory reloaded the gun. "Ben, I'm weak." The choking became a bubbling squeal. Goodman Cory stumbled toward the window.
Ben's mother was kneeling in the doorway between the rooms, Reuben clutched in her arms, her cheek against his head. She was praying. The light of the fires showed Ben her moving lips, her dark eyes that now and then sought for him, too. Goodman Cory had halted short of the window, crucified by uncertainty, the flintlock a stiff burden. "Ben," he said—"Ben, hear me...."
The crash of an axe against the oaken door blotted out at last the clamor of a man strangling in his own blood. But Ben could still hear his mother praying.
"A stone axe, not steel," said Joseph Cory, and nodded to Ben as one man to another. "No good against our oak."