"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 pa.s.s, 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 gla.s.s 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."

"Will you shoot through the door?"

"... _and forgive us our trespa.s.ses_ ..."

"Nay--only waste a bullet. Ben, thou art a man--if I'm lost, take care of thy mother and Reuben. Be ready. Readiness--I mean _alway_--later--all thy life--readiness, wherein I've failed."

"You've not failed."

"No time for kindness." He shook Ben's arm. "Ben--if G.o.d liveth he is far away."

"... _for thine is the kingdom_ ..."

"Ben, hear me," said Goodman Cory. "I say G.o.d is far away, no whit concerned with man."

"Deliver us," said Adna Cory--"deliver us from evil...."

"I wanted learning, Ben. Find more than I did."

The good oak was barely quivering under the petulant fury of the stone axe. "But Father, you know so much----"

"I? Learning--oh, a key to so many doors! Why, I never found but a few, sniffing at the threshold, a fool, a b.u.mpkin. And Reuben must find learning too." He pulled Ben close, crouching, whispering: "Ben, hear me. I fear for Reuben. I pray you, keep him from being too much wounded.

I can't understand him, Ben. Thou art mine own, I _know_ thee--while he--nay, I haven't words...."

"But Father, you will----"

The pounding ceased. Sudden footsteps thumped rhythmically on snow.

Something different smashed against the oak with the gross dullness of the invincible. Goodman Cory pushed his son into the front room. "The devils have found a log. Why, Ben, I shall live if I may."

It was an honest door, three-ply, studded with nails; the log ram thundered five times before that barrier yielded. Then Ben's eyes winced at high-crested devil-shadows surging in the orange glare.

Goodman Cory wasted no shot on the two who rushed the entrance. The muzzle of his gun found their heads, snake-swift, aimed like the course of a bullet. They collapsed in a mess of legs and arms. With thumping violence a hatchet skidded across the floor.

Ben saw his father clamber over the stunned enemy and past the wreckage of oaken boards. He heard his father shout in a voice so searching that all the roaring confusion, magnified with the door down and a sudden cold wind in the gap crying, was momentarily a silence: "Did you come here to murder children?"

A French officer ten yards away in the corrupted snow gracefully lifted his flintlock and shot Goodman Cory through the heart.

He said: "Mother, you must not shield me." But in her prayers she did not hear him.

The room before him spread out as a ma.s.s of darkness holding two oblong mouths of h.e.l.l, yet from moment to moment as his mother prayed, Reuben was aware, coldly aware that those two h.e.l.l-gates were simply windows of the house where he lived: the west window displaying an absurd, pretty hole--who'd have thought a bullet could go through without shattering all the gla.s.s?--the south window a fainter gleaming, for its shutters were partly closed and the glare of the fires came upon it indirectly--beautiful in fact, rather like first light of a red-sky morning; rather like----

Wind struck him, rushing through the ravished door, and Reuben thought: _Now!_ "Mother, let me go! Let me----" but her cheek was heavy and hot against his head; her arms would not understand; he could not hurt her by struggling to free himself.

Someone, maybe Father, shouted a dim word or two outside and was answered by a blast of gunfire. In the room behind them Jesse Plum raved. _Mother, let me speak to you_--Reuben understood he had not said it aloud.

"_Deliver us from evil--deliver us from evil...._"

It was coming.

Reuben had known it, waited for it, now watched with no astonishment as the thing on all fours lurched obscenely from the entry into the front room and fumbled about, snorting, searching for the axe.

Reuben caught his mother's wrists and pushed her arms away--no help for it. Amazed at their clinging strength, he was more amazed that he had the power to overcome it, and without harming her. He was free and not free.

He could drive himself a few steps forward, but it seemed that the air between him and the thing on all fours had thickened to monstrous glue.

His lungs must toil to fill themselves. He located the thing again as it crouched and began to rise. With all his force, with a sense of huge achievement, he spat on the face of it.

Reuben felt it at first simply as a brutal and foul indignity when the thing, rising to a vast height, laid a hand flat across his face and lifted him so, with nothing but iron thumb and finger gouging under his cheekbones, and flung him sprawling. He struck the bed, and during some long sluggish course of time, two or three seconds perhaps, he secured a bedpost and hauled himself upright, finding that the firelight from the west window was now behind him, and everything was changed. He must get back across the room.

The thing towered to the ceiling between him and his mother, who still knelt in the doorway and still prayed. He must get back across the room.

She would not look up. It might be she did not see, did not know the stone axe was swinging down. He must go back across the room.

Reuben felt the scream wrenched out of his throat: he himself had nothing to do with it. He was certain then that he was running back across the room. This room or some other, in this world or some other.

Ben moved into the light, stumbling over the ravished door, falling, gathering himself in one motion to go on, to kneel beside the unresponding mouth, knowing that his father was dead. His mind retained an ice-fire shrewdness, a corner-of-the-eye intelligence understanding the smoking houses, the running, the shrieking, the fur-capped Frenchman who was reloading, and shouting too in foreign-sounding English: "_Surrender!_"--was that what the fool was yammering? To Ben he appeared a stupid and trivial man with babyish pop eyes--couldn't the fellow understand that Goodman Cory was dead?

Ben was on his feet, his father's gun dull and heavy--loaded, too, he realized. The French officer fired, clumsily this time, and a hornet-thing of no importance muttered past Ben's ear.

In the house, someone screamed.

Ben turned his back on the Frenchman dreamily. "Acquire learning?"

Delayed knowledge of the scream penetrated him like blown flame. A man in the entry was struggling to rise. Automatically, with no conscious anger, Ben clubbed the gun against the black head, catching the Indian smell of acorn grease and paint. Should he now shoot through the deerskin jacket?--no, because he must be already dead. Ben had heard and felt the splintering of bone. And anyway this man was only one, and there had been two.

The fires continued in his eyes and shifted to blackness. Here in the front room he couldn't see. He knew his mother or maybe Reuben had screamed. He understood the blackness was in his head, a vertigo, and he called: "I'm coming to you, Mother!" The blackness dissolved, giving back the room. He must look there, where she was lying, and the spilled blood, and the boy kneeling beside her saying quite softly over and over: "Mother--Mother...."