bearing their share of the goods, but pressing close to their elders’ skirts; men went to and fro, the most grimly silent, but a few talking loudly. Not all of the faces in the crowd belonged to the town: there were Kingsmell and his wife from the main, and John Ellison from Archer’s Hope, and the Italians Vincencio and Bernardo from the Glass House. The nearer plantations, then, had been warned, and their people had come for refuge to the city. A negro passed, but on that morning, alone of many days, no Indian aired his paint and feathers in the white man’s village.

I could not see the palisade across the neck, but I knew that it was there that the fight — if fight there were — would be made. Should the Indians take the palisade, there would yet be the houses of the town, and, last of all,