Part 2

Suddenly Widow Eunice Bishop, at a fresh onslaught upon the door, and a fiercer yell, lifted up her voice and shrieked back in a rage as mad as theirs. Her speech, too, was almost inarticulate, and the sense of it lost in a savage frenzy; her tongue stuttered over abusive epithets; but for a second she prevailed over the terrible chorus without. It was like the solo of a fury. Then louder yells drowned her out; the muskets cracked faster; the men rammed in the charges; the savages fell back somewhat; the blows on the door ceased.

Silence ran up the stairs to her chamber, and peeped cautiously out of a little dormer-window. Deerfield village was roaring with flames, the sky and snow were red, and leaping through the glare came the painted savages, a savage white face and the waving sword of a French officer in their midst. The awful warwhoops and the death-cries of her friends and neighbors sounded in her ears. She saw, close under her window, the dark sweep of the tomahawk, the quick glance of the scalping-knife, and the red starting of caps of blood. She saw infants dashed through the air, and the backward-straining forms of shrieking women dragged down the street; but she saw not David Walcott anywhere.

She eyed in an agony some dark bodies lying like logs in the snow. A wild impulse seized her to run out, turn their dead faces, and see that none of them was her lover’s. Her room was full of red light; everything in it showed distinctly. The roof of the next house crashed in, and the sparks and cinders shot up like a volcano. There was a great outcry of terror from below, and Silence hurried down. The Indians were trying to fire the house from the west side. They had piled a bank of brush against it, and the men had hacked new loop-holes and were beating them back.

John Carson’s wife clutched Silence as she entered the keeping-room. “They are trying to set the house on fire,” she gasped, “and--the bullets are giving out!” The woman held a little child hugged close to her breast; she strained him closer. “They shall not have him, anyway,” she said. Her mouth looked white and stiff.

“Put him down and help, then,” said Silence. She began pulling the pewter plates off the dresser.

“What be you doing with my pewter plates?” screamed her aunt at her elbow.

Silence said nothing. She went on piling the plates under her arm.

“Think you I will have the pewter plates I have had ever since I was wed, melted to make bullets for those limbs of Satan?”

Silence carried the plates to the fire; the women piled on wood and made it hotter. John Carson’s wife laid her baby on the settle and helped, and Widow Bishop brought out her pewter spoons, and her silver cream-jug when the pewter ran low, and finally her dead husband’s knee-buckles from the cedar chest. All the pewter and silver in Widow Eunice Bishop’s house were melted down that night. The women worked with desperate zeal to supply the men with bullets, and just before the ammunition failed, the Indians left Deerfield village, with their captives in their train.

The men had stopped firing at last. Everything was quiet outside, except for the flurry of musket-shots down on the meadow, where the skirmish was going on between the Hatfield men and the retreating French and Indians. The dawn was breaking, but not a shutter had been stirred in the Bishop house; the inmates were clustered together, their ears straining for another outburst of slaughter.

Suddenly there was a strange crackling sound overhead; a puff of hot smoke came into the room from the stairway. The roof had caught fire from the shower of sparks, and the stanch house that had withstood all the fury of the savages was going the way of its neighbors.

The men rushed up the stair, and fell back. “We can’t save it!” Captain Isaac Moulton said, hoarsely. He was an old man, and his white hair tossed wildly around his powder-blackened face.

Widow Eunice Bishop scuttled into her bedroom, and got her best silk hood and her giltframed looking-glass. “Silence, get out the feather-bed!” she shrieked.

The keeping-room was stifling with smoke. Captain Moulton loosened a window-shutter cautiously and peered out. “I see no sign of the savages,” he said. They unbolted the door, and opened it inch by inch, but there was no exultant shout in response. The crack of muskets on the meadow sounded louder; that was all.

Widow Eunice Bishop pushed forward before the others; the danger by fire to her household goods had driven her own danger from her mind, which could compass but one terror at a time. “Let me forth!” she cried; and she laid the looking-glass and silk hood on the snow, and pelted back into the smoke for her feather-bed and the best andirons.

Silence carried out the spinning-wheel, and the others caught up various articles which they had wit to see in the panic. They piled them up on the snow outside, and huddled together, staring fearfully down the village street. They saw, amid the smouldering ruins, Ensign John Sheldon’s house standing.

“We must make for that,” said Captain Isaac Moulton, and they started. The men went before and behind, with their muskets in readiness, and the women and children walked between. Widow Bishop carried the looking-glass; somebody had helped her to bring out her feather-bed, and she had dragged it to a clean place well away from the burning house.

The dawnlight lay pale and cold in the east; it was steadily overcoming the fire-glow from the ruins. Nobody would have known Deerfield village. The night before the sun had gone down upon the snowy slants of humble roofs and the peaceful rise of smoke from pleasant hearth fires. The curtained windows had gleamed out one by one with mild candle-light, and serene faces of white-capped matrons preparing supper had passed them. Now, on both sides of Deerfield street were beds of glowing red coals; grotesque ruins of door-posts and chimneys in the semblances of blackened martyrs stood crumbling in the midst of them, and twisted charred heaps, which the people eyed trembling, lay in the old doorways. The snow showed great red patches in the gathering light, and in them lay still bodies that seemed to move.

Silence Hoit sprang out from the hurrying throng, and turned the head of one dead man whose face she could not see. The horror of his red crown did not move her. She only saw that he was not David Walcott. She stooped and wiped off her hands in some snow.

“That is Israel Bennett,” the others groaned.

John Carson’s wife had been the dead man’s sister. She hugged her baby tighter, and pressed more closely to her husband’s back. There was no longer any sound of musketry on the meadows. There was not a sound to be heard except the wind in the dry trees and the panting breaths of the knot of people.

A dead baby lay directly in the path, and a woman caught it up, and tried to warm it at her breast. She wrapped her cloak around it, and wiped its little bloody face with her apron. “’Tis not dead,” she declared, frantically; “the child is not dead!” She had not shed a tear nor uttered a wail before, but now she began sobbing aloud over the dead child. It was Goodwife Barnard’s, and no kin to her; she was a single woman. The others were looking right and left for lurking savages; she looked only at the little cold face on her bosom. “The child breathes,” she said, and hurried on faster that she might get succor for it.

The party halted before Ensign John Sheldon’s house. The stout door was fast, but there was a hole in it, as if hacked by a tomahawk. The men tried it and shook it. “Open, open, Goodwife Sheldon!” they hallooed. “Friends! friends! Open the door!” But there was no response.

Silence Hoit left the throng at the door, and began clambering up on a slant of icy snow to a window which was flung wide open. The window-sill was stained with blood, and so was the snow.

One of the men caught Silence and tried to hold her back. “There may be Indians in there,” he whispered, hoarsely.

But Silence broke away from him, and was in through the window, and the men followed her, and unbolted the door for the women, who pressed in wildly, and flung it to again. A child who was among them, little Comfort Arms, stationed herself directly with her tiny back against the door, with her mouth set like a soldier’s, and her blue eyes gleaming fierce under her flaxen locks. “They shall not get in,” said she. Somehow she had gotten hold of a great horse-pistol, which she carried like a doll.

Nobody heeded her, Silence least of all. She stared about the room, with her lips parted. Right before her on the hearth lay a little three-year-old girl, Mercy Sheldon, her pretty head in a pool of blood, but Silence cast only an indifferent glance when the others gathered about her, groaning and sighing.

Suddenly Silence sprang towards a dark heap near the pantry door, but it was only a woman’s quilted petticoat.

The spinning-wheel lay broken on the floor, and all the simple furniture was strewn about wildly. Silence went into Goodwife Sheldon’s bedroom, and the others followed her, trembling, all except little Comfort Arms, who stood unflinchingly with her back pressed against the door, and the single woman, Grace Mather; she stayed behind, and put wood on the fire, after she had picked up the quilted petticoat, and laid the dead baby tenderly wrapped in it on the settle. Then she pulled the settle forward before the fire, and knelt before it, and fell to chafing the little limbs of the dead baby, weeping as she did so.

Goodwife Sheldon’s bedroom was in wild disorder. A candle still burned, although it was very low, on the table, whose linen cover had great red finger-prints on it. Goodwife Sheldon’s decent clothes were tossed about on the floor; the curtains of the bed were half torn away. Silence pressed forward unshrinkingly towards the bed; the others, even the men, hung back. There lay Goodwife Sheldon dead in her bed. All the light in the room, the candle-light and the low daylight, seemed to focus upon her white, frozen profile propped stiffly on the pillow, where she had fallen back when the bullet came through that hole in the door.

Silence looked at her. “Where is David, Goodwife Sheldon?” said she.

Eunice Bishop sprang forward. “Be you clean out of your mind, Silence Hoit?” she cried. “Know you not she’s dead? She’s dead! Oh, she’s dead, she’s dead! An’ here’s her best silk hood trampled underfoot on the floor!” Eunice snatched up the hood, and seized Silence by the arm, but she pushed her back.

“Where is David? Where is he gone?” she demanded again of the dead woman.

The other women came crowding around Silence then, and tried to soothe her and reason with her, while their own faces were white with horror and woe. Goodwife Sarah Spear, an old woman whose sons lay dead in the street outside, put an arm around the girl, and tried to draw her head to her broad bosom.

“Mayhap you will find him, sweetheart,” she said. “He’s not among the dead out there.”

But Silence broke away from the motherly arm, and sped wildly through the other rooms, with the people at her heels, and her aunt crying vainly after her. They found no more dead in the house; naught but ruin and disorder, and bloody footprints and handprints of savages.

When they returned to the keeping-room, Silence seated herself on a stool by the fire, and held out her hands towards the blaze to warm them. The daylight was broad outside now, and the great clock that had come from overseas ticked; the Indians had not touched that.

Captain Isaac Moulton lifted little Mercy Sheldon from the hearth and carried her to her dead mother in the bedroom, and two of the older women went in there and shut the door. Little Comfort Arms still stood with her back against the outer door, and Grace Mather tended the dead baby on the settle.

“What do ye with that dead child?” a woman called out roughly to her.

“I tell ye ’tis not dead; it breathes,” returned Grace Mather; and she never turned her harsh, plain face from the dead child.

“An’ I tell ye ’tis dead.”

“An’ I tell ye ’tis not dead. I need but some hot posset for it.”

Goodwife Carson began to weep. She hugged her own living baby tighter. “Let her alone!” she sobbed. “I wonder our wits be not all gone.” She went sobbing over to little Comfort Arms at the door. “Come away, sweetheart, and draw near the fire,” she pleaded, brokenly.

The little girl looked obstinately up at her. “They shall not come in,” she said. “The wicked savages shall not come in again.”

“No more shall they, an’ the Lord be willing, sweet. But, I pray you, come away from the door now.”

Comfort shook her head, and she looked like her father as he fought on the Deerfield meadows.

“The savages are gone, sweet.”

But Comfort answered not a word, and Goodwife Carson sat down and began to nurse her baby. One of the women hung the porridge-kettle over the fire; another put some potatoes in the ashes to bake. Presently the two women came out of Goodwife Sheldon’s bedroom with grave, strained faces, and held their stiff blue fingers out to the hearth fire.

Eunice Bishop, who was stirring the porridge, looked at them with sharp curiosity. “How look they?” she whispered.

“As peaceful as if they slept,” replied Goodwife Spear, who was one of the women.

“And the child’s head?”

“We put on her little white cap with the lace frills.”

Eunice stirred the bubbling porridge, scowling in the heat and steam; some of the women laid the table with Hannah Sheldon’s linen cloth and pewter dishes, and presently the breakfast was dished up.

Little Comfort Arms had sunk at the foot of the nail-studded door in a deep slumber. She slept at her post like the faithless sentry whose slumbers the night before had brought about the destruction of Deerfield village. Goodwife Spear raised her up, but her curly head drooped helplessly.

“Wake up, Comfort, and have a sup of hot porridge,” she called in her ear.

She led her over to the table, Comfort stumbling weakly at arm’s-length, and set her on a stool with a dish of porridge before her, which she ate uncertainly in a dazed fashion, with her eyes filming and her head nodding.

They all gathered gravely around the table, except Silence Hoit and Grace Mather. Silence sat still, staring at the fire, and Grace had dipped out a little cup of the hot porridge, and was trying to feed it to the dead baby, with crooning words.

“Silence, why come you not to the table?” her aunt called out.

“I want nothing,” answered Silence.

“I see not why you should so set yourself up before the others, as having so much more to bear,” said Eunice, sharply. “There is Goodwife Spear, with her sons unburied on the road yonder, and she eats her porridge with good relish.”

John Carson’s wife set her baby on her husband’s knee, and carried a dish of porridge to Silence.

“Try and eat it, sweet,” she whispered. She was near Silence’s age.

Silence looked up at her. “I want it not,” said she.

“But he may not be dead, sweet. He may presently be home. You would not he should find you spent and fainting. Perchance he may have wounds for you to tend.”

Silence seized the dish and began to eat the porridge in great spoonfuls, gulping it down fast.

The people at the table eyed her sadly and whispered, and they also cast frequent glances at Grace Mather bending over the dead baby. Once Captain Isaac Moulton called out to her in his gruff old voice, which he tried to soften, and she answered back, sharply: “Think ye I will leave this child while it breathes, Captain Isaac Moulton? In faith I am the only one of ye all who has regard to it.”

But suddenly, when the meal was half over, Grace Mather arose, and gathered up the little dead baby, carried it into Goodwife Sheldon’s bedroom, and was gone some time.

“She has lost her wits,” said Eunice Bishop. “Think you not we should follow her? She may do some harm.”

“Nay, let her be,” said Goodwife Spear.

When at last Grace Mather came out of the bedroom, and they all turned to look at her, her face was stern but quite composed. “I found a little clean linen shift in the chest,” she said to Goodwife Spear, who nodded gravely. Then she sat down at the table and ate.

The people, as they ate, cast frequent glances at the barred door and the shuttered windows. The daylight was broad outside, but there was no glimmer of it in the room, and the candles were lighted. They dared not yet remove the barricades, and the muskets were in readiness: the Indians might return.

All at once there was a shrill clamor at the door, and men sprang to their muskets. The women clutched each other, panting.

“Unbar the door!” shrieked a quavering old voice. “I tell ye, unbar the door! I be nigh frozen a-standing here. Unbar the door! The Indians are gone hours ago.”

“’Tis Goody Crane!” cried Eunice Bishop.

Captain Isaac Moulton shot back the bolts and opened the door a little way, while the men stood close at his back, and Goody Crane slid in like a swift black shadow out of the daylight.

She crouched down close to the fire, trembling and groaning, and the women gave her some hot porridge.

“Where have ye been?” demanded Eunice Bishop.

“Where they found me not,” replied the old woman, and there was a sudden leer like a light in the gloom of her great hood. She motioned towards the bedroom door.

“Goody Sheldon sleeps late this morning, and so doth Mercy,” said she. “I trow she will not dip her candles to-day.”

The people looked at each other; a subtler horror than that of the night before shook their spirits.

Captain Isaac Moulton towered over the old woman on the hearth. “How knew you Goodwife Sheldon and Mercy were dead?” he asked, sternly.

[Illustration: AT ENSIGN SHELDON’S HOUSE THE MORNING AFTER THE MASSACRE]

The old woman leered up at him undauntedly; her head bobbed. There was a curious grotesqueness about her blanketed and hooded figure when in motion. There was so little of the old woman herself visible that motion surprised, as it would have done in a puppet. “Told I not Goody Sheldon last night she would never stir porridge again?” said she. “Who stirred the porridge this morning? I trow Goody Sheldon’s hands be too stiff and too cold, though they have stirred well in their day. Hath she dipped her candles yet? Hath she begun on her weaving? I trow ’twill be a long day ere Mary Sheldon’s linen-chest be filled, if she herself go a-gadding to Canada and her mother sleep so late.”

“Eat this hot porridge and stop your croaking,” said Goodwife Spear, stooping over her.

The old woman extended her two shaking hands for the dish. “That was what she said last night,” she returned. “The living echo the dead, and that is enough wisdom for a witch.”

“You’ll be burned for a witch yet, Goody Crane, an you be not careful,” cried Eunice Bishop.

“There is fire enough outside to burn all the witches in the land,” muttered the old woman, sipping her porridge. Suddenly she eyed Silence sitting motionless opposite. “Where be your sweetheart this fine morning, Silence Hoit?” she inquired.

Silence looked at her. There was a strange likeness between the glitter in her blue eyes and that in Goody Crane’s black ones.

The old woman’s great hood nodded over the porridge-dish. “I can tell ye, Mistress Silence,” she said, thickly, as she ate. “He is gone to Canada on a moose-hunt, and unless I be far wrong, he hath taken thy wits with him.”

“How know you David Walcott is gone to Canada?” cried Eunice Bishop; and Silence stared at her with her hard blue eyes.

Silence’s soft fair hair hung all matted like uncombed flax over her pale cheeks. There was a rigid, dead look about her girlish forehead and her sweet mouth.

“I know,” returned Goody Crane, nodding her head.

The women washed the pewter dishes, set them back on the dresser, and swept the floor. Little Comfort Arms had been carried up-stairs and laid in the bed whence poor Mary Sheldon had been dragged and haled to Canada. The men stood talking near their stacked muskets. One of the shutters had been opened and the candles put out. The winter sun shone in the window as it had shone before, but the poor folk in Ensign Sheldon’s keeping-room saw it with a certain shock, as if it were a stranger. That morning their own hearts had in them such strangeness that they transferred it like motion to all familiar objects. The very iron dogs in the Sheldon fireplace seemed on the leap with tragedy, and the porridge-kettle swung darkly out of some former age.

Now and then one of the men opened the door cautiously and peered out and listened. The reek of the smouldering village came in at the door, but there was not a sound except the whistling howl of the savage north wind, which still swept over the valley. There was not a shot to be heard from the meadows. The men discussed the wisdom of leaving the women for a short space and going forth to explore, but Widow Eunice Bishop interposed, thrusting her sharp face in among them.

“Here we be,” scolded she, “a passel of women and children, and Hannah Sheldon and Mercy a-lying dead, and me with my house burnt down, and nothing saved except my silk hood and my looking-glass and my feather-bed, and it’s a mercy if that’s not all smooched, and you talk of going off and leaving us!”

The men looked doubtfully at one another; then there was the hissing creak of footsteps on the snow outside, and Widow Bishop screamed. “Oh, the Indians have come back!” she proclaimed.

Silence looked up.

The door was tried from without.

“Who’s there?” cried out Captain Moulton.

“John Sheldon,” responded a hoarse voice. “Who’s inside?”

Captain Moulton threw open the door, and John Sheldon stood there. His severe and sober face was painted like an Indian’s with blood and powder grime; he stood staring in at the company.

“Come in, quick, and let us bar the door!” screamed Eunice Bishop.

John Sheldon came in hesitatingly, and stood looking around the room.

“Have you but just come from the meadows?” inquired Captain Moulton. But John Sheldon did not seem to hear him. He stared at the company, who all stood still staring back at him; then he looked hard and long at the doors, as if expecting some one to enter. The eyes of the others followed his, but no one spoke.

“Where’s Hannah?” asked John Sheldon.

Then the women began to weep.