“The same,” replied Philip quickly, his blood beginning to thrill with the anticipation of battle.  “I’ll give you half.  I’m on duty from Fort Churchill, off on a tangent of my own.”  He did not take his eyes from the slit in the wall as he told Anderson in a hundred words what had happened since his meeting with Bram Johnson.  “And with forty cartridges we’ll give ’em a taste of hell,” he added.

He caught his breath, and the last word half choked itself from his lips.  He knew that Anderson was staring as hard as he.  Up from the river and over the level sweep of plain between it and the timber came a sledge, followed by a second, a third, and a fourth.  In the trail behind the sledges trotted a score and a half of fur-clad figures.

“It’s Blake!” exclaimed Philip.

Anderson drew himself away from the wall.  In his eyes burned a curious greenish flame, and his face was set with the hardness of iron.  In that iron was molded indistinctly the terrible smile with which he always went into battle or fronted “his man.”  Slowly he turned, pointing a long arm at each of the four walls of the cabin.

“That’s the lay of the fight,” he said, making his words short and to the point.  “They can come at us on all sides, and so I’ve made a six-foot gun-crevice in each wall.  We can’t count on Armin for anything but the use of a club if it comes to close quarters.  The walls are built of saplings and they’ve got guns out there that get through.  Outside of that we’ve got one big advantage.  The little devils are superstitious about fighting at night, and even Blake can’t force them into it.  Blake is the man I was after when I ran across Armin and his people.  Gad!”

There was an unpleasant snap in his voice as he peered through the gun-hole again.  Philip looked across the room to Celie and her father as he divided the cartridges.  They were both listening, yet he knew they did not understand what he and Olaf were saying.  He dropped a half of the cartridges into the right hand pocket of the Swede’s service coat, and advanced then toward Armin with both his hands held out in greeting.  Even in that tense moment he saw the sudden flash of pleasure in Celie’s eyes.  Her lips trembled, and she spoke softly and swiftly to her father, looking at Philip.  Armin advanced a step, and their hands met.  At first Philip had taken him for an old man.  Hair and beard were white, his shoulders were bent, his hands were long and thin.  But his eyes, sunken deep in their sockets, had not aged with the rest of him.  They were filled with the piercing scrutiny of a hawk’s as they looked into his own, measuring him in that moment so far as man can measure man.  Then he spoke, and it was the light in Celie’s eyes, her parted lips, and the flush that came swiftly into her face that gave him an understanding of what Armin was saying.

From the end of the cabin Olaf’s voice broke in.  With it came the metallic working of his rifle as he filled the chamber with cartridges.  He spoke first to Celie and Armin in their own language, then to Philip.