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."
"Will you shoot through the door?"
"... and forgive us our trespasses ..."
"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 God liveth he is far away."
"... for thine is the kingdom ..."
"Ben, hear me," said Goodman Cory. "I say God 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 bumpkin. 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 mass of darkness holding two oblong mouths of Hell, yet from moment to moment as his mother prayed, Reuben was aware, coldly aware that those two hell-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 glass?—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
