“Jim,” she said, when the clock had struck ten, then eleven, “I am going to fasten up the house.”

“Do you hear them?” he asked, without emotion, but as one who deferred to the finer senses of women.

She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak.

He looked at the door that was shrunken and warped from the heat till it barely held together, and there was no measure to the tenderness he put into: 

“Oh, you poor little fool, do you think you could keep them out by fastening that?”

“Jim, I must,” and her voice broke.  “They may think you are not here, that it’s only me and the children, and that’s why the house is fastened.”  She got up and began to move about as though her thoughts scourged her to action, even if futile.  He shook the ashes from his pipe.

“Do anything you blame please,” he said, more by way of humoring her than from faith in her stratagem.  He felt strong enough to face his destiny, to meet it in a way worthy of his mother’s people.

Alida seemed under a spell in her preparations for the night.  Each thing she did as she had done it in her dream the night before; it was as if she were constrained by a power greater than her will to fulfil a sinister prophecy.  Yet now and then she would stop and wonder if she might not break the spell by doing things differently from the way she had dreamed them.  Her hand grasped the knob of the door uncertainly, and she swung it to and fro on its creaking hinges, while her mind seemed likewise to sway hither and thither.  Should she fasten the door and push the bureau against it, as it had been in the dream, or should she leave door and windows gaping wide for them?  And then, as one who walks and does familiar things in sleep, she shut the door and turned the key.  Jim smiled at her, but she could no longer look at him.  One of the children wailed fretfully from the room beyond.  Sleep had become a scourge in the stifling heat.  One by one she lowered the windows and nailed them down; then she dragged the brown bureau against the door, took the brace of six-shooters from the wall, and sat down with Jim to wait.

“What are you going to do with them toys?” he asked, as he saw her examine the chambers of one of the six-shooters.

“You ain’t going to let yourself be caught like a rat in a hole, are you?” she reproached him.

“’Ain’t we agreed that it’s best to keep onpleasant family matters from the kids?” He smiled at her bravely.  “The remembrance of what we’re anticipatin’ ain’t going to help young Jim to get to Congress when his time comes, nor it ain’t going to help the girls get good husbands, either.  This here country ain’t what it was in the way of liberality since it’s got to be a State.”